If you're a senior leader, you're making tricky choices in complicated circumstances, there's probably not a 'right' answer. This means making good decisions is about how we think, not what we think..
1. You waste time going around in circles
2. Your decisions don’t stick
3. Your teams feel uncertain and don’t know what to focus on.
Decisions: an introduction
Decisions: Introduction A sneak-peek from the Not An MBA curriculum.
Doubtful leaders get nervous about tricky decisions. They want perfect answers and watertight processes, so they'll either drag their feet looking for the perfect solution or rush to an answer that nobody else has the chance to buy into.
Decisive leaders are different. They lean into uncertainty and create a safe, curious space to interrogate assumptions and convert uncertainty into action.
Instead of trying to be right and pointing fingers at people when things go wrong, the decisive leader is more open. They’re careful to set the right frame, and pay attention to engaging with people, challenging assumptions and experimenting with options. They'd rather make a minimum viable decision they can tweak along the way than enforce a grand plan.
For all these reasons, decisive leaders are more trusted and effective.
What you can do to be more decisive
You don’t need to be super-intelligent or have a strategy MBA to make better decisions. In fact, intelligence, like promotion, can hold us back as we get too confident in the quality of our thinking and close ourselves off.
Besides, when you're in the hot seat, being right won't necessarily help you, especially if you don't have the support of the people around you. Change is a team sport, and our decision-making should reflect that.
How to improve your decisions
- Practise your thinking skills. Create deliberate space away from busy work. Clear time in your calendar, schedule big-picture conversations and start to nudge the culture of your team or organisation away from urgent business.
- Carefully consider the process for your next big decision. Who do you need to be involved? What criteria will you use to decide the right path? How will you test your ideas?
- Reflect on a decision that didn’t go well. What was missing? Was the timing wrong? Did you fail to get the right people on board? Were your motivations off?
- Keep asking tricky questions. When something makes sense, poke it with a stick – are you sure about that? How do you know? Could something else be true? Treat your decisions like babies – small, imperfect and works in progress.
1. Why does this matter?
2. How do we choose?
3. What's the smallest experiment we can try?
