You probably know that the word “decide” means to kill choice. It may have been your experience that you rose through an organization, because you were willing to take a risk and choose. You might be able to do this better than your peers.
How do you make a choice? At this point it may be so intuitive you are not aware of your process. How can you teach your rising stars good decision making if you can’t break it into its constituent parts?
Let me guess what you do:
- Gather data
- Develop choices
- Consider the outcomes of the choices in terms of your organization’s long term goals and the short term effects.
- Look at who it affects and how they will react.
- Get input from others
- Make the decision
- Communicate the decision
- Defend or explain the decision
As a leader, you will have parts of this process you do well and parts that just don’t come easily to you. Some people don’t seek a lot of data. They work from their gut. “Intuition” is an accumulation of past experiences as you interpret them. It works pretty well. However, sometimes we don’t challenge the similarity between this experience and the past, and we end up making a mistake.
Other people love gathering data and developing choices. They never get all the way to step 6 because they see the downside to any decision, and hope more data will solve that. No decision is not a good decision.
Then you have the folks who don’t spend enough time getting buy-in once they’ve made their decision. Just a little communication as to why they made the decision would have gone a long way to making the decision and the implementation successful.
My bet is one of these describes you. The next time you have to make a big decision, (maybe tomorrow), pay attention to hitting each of these points and see if the results improve.
photo courtesy of www.laneterralever.com