It’s common for leaders to worry about whether they’re making the right decisions for their organizations. But many don’t worry enough about whether they should be the ones making those decisions in the first place.

Knowing when to own a choice and when to delegate it is one of the most important skills for leaders to develop, Victoria Medvec explained in a 2017 piece for Kellogg Insight. Smart leaders learn to assess the risk involved in a given decision and let that assessment guide their level of involvement, writes Medvec, a professor of management and organizations here at Kellogg.

All too often, executives end up making small-potatoes decisions, either because they insist on it or because their teams don’t feel sufficiently empowered. This wastes time and creates frustration for everyone. “The reality is that every individual, including the CEO, has limited cognitive resources—resources that should be reserved for addressing the most fundamental issues facing the company at any given time,” Medvec writes. “The biggest mistakes often occur when those at the top are using their mental energy on decisions that are not that critical.”

Similarly, many organizations allow less-consequential choices to eat up too much of their time. Medvec recalls meeting with a group of leaders at one company that was spending more time mulling staffing decisions than a possible acquisition. That’s probably not the best approach, she argues. After all, a bad hire likely won’t destroy a company, but a bad acquisition might.

Leaders should conserve their analytic rigor for the decisions that need it most. “Paralysis by analysis” can eat up valuable time, and a thorough examination of pros and cons isn’t always required—for low-stakes decisions, feeling 50 or 70 percent sure, or even going on gut, might be just fine.

To learn more about when to delegate, read the whole article here.

Bot or not?

These days, it’s not always easy to tell the difference between a bot and real person online (a challenge that could get worse as bots get better). But as we look for evidence about whether a social-media post was written by a bot or a human, we should recognize that we’re likely being influenced by how much we agree with it.

This is according to a new study by Adam Waytz, a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School, and his colleagues. “When you see something that disagrees with you, you’re more likely to attribute it to a bot than people who agree with it,” Waytz explains.

In one study, both Republicans and Democrats perceived tweets from their political foes as being more likely to come from a bot than did their political counterparts who agreed with the messaging. The researchers dubbed this pattern “political bot bias.”

In another study, when participants were told that a tweet with which they disagreed had been written by a bot, they rated it much lower in terms of trustworthiness than did participants who had been told that the same tweet had been written by a human. They were also inclined to take it less seriously.

Believing content was written by a bot, says Waytz, “makes you discount the information”—a cycle that may contribute to further polarization.

You can read more about the research in Kellogg Insight.