As a leader at your job or as a manager within your organization, you will have to make tough decisions. These decisions may include the need to hire or fire someone, or they could include the need to make strategic decisions about company partnerships. Having a poor decision making process can hamper you as a leader, threaten your legitimacy, and lead to unwanted outcomes. Improving your decision making is just like anything else, it takes practice. But a good place to start is by creating a framework for your success.
Don’t Make Permanent Decisions In Temporary Emotional Moments
The easiest way to become a better decision maker is to stop making decisions while you are in an emotional moment. Did an employee make a critical mistake that upset you? Take a breath before making a personnel decision. Did your vendor come up short when you needed them last month? Think about it before making a change. Oftentimes we make decisions in anger without stopping to think of all the potential consequences. We don’t evaluate all of the possible outcomes. As a result, decisions made in emotional moments are more likely to lead to mistakes that cost us personally and our organizations collectively. Stop making decisions in a moment of anger, fear, or sadness. Instead, take a deep breath and think about it for a bit. Let the emotions pass, evaluate the situation, and then make a decision.
Create A Workflow For Big Decisions
In big organizations, leaders typically make significant decisions with the help of their workflow. A good workflow for organizational decisions will help leaders to figure out what steps to take and which opinions to consider before making the leap. Workflows are generally extremely detailed and used by more than one manager or leader in an organization, so it might be a good idea to create one with a team instead of by yourself.
Build A Circle That You Can Trust
This is may be the most important. Nobody can consistently make good decisions by themselves. It is a great idea to build a team of managers that you can trust and bounce ideas off of. You might not always take their advice, but hearing their concerns can help you think of situations from a different perspective. This can help prevent you from missing critical problems that you might not have thought of.
Becoming a better decision maker takes time, just like anything else. You aren’t going to immediately make the best possible decision in every situation overnight. Decision making isn’t always easy either, regardless of how skilled you are at it and how good your framework is. It still might take you awhile to come to a conclusion about a particularly complex topic. However, improving your decision making process makes it significantly more likely that the conclusion that you come to is the right decision, and that you and your organization will be better off for making it.