In Chapter D of Construction Leadership from A to Z I address decisiveness as a key leadership trait. Clearly you cannot lead anything of you are unable to make a quality decision.

Chip and Dan Heath, the authors of Made To Stick ( a good read) have penned another book. This one is called Decisive: How To Make Better Decisions in Life and Work. They offer several ideas on making better decisions

Consider the issue as if you were someone else. What would someone else do in this case? In the military we might call this a red team review where another team looks at your solution and offers comments and insights from their different perspective. When you look at it from a different perspective you are better able to remove your emotions and biases.

Another tip. Ask yourself what you would tell your best friend to do if a personal scenario. At work, ask yourself, what would your successor do if you were replaced tomorrow?

Be careful about over optimism too. Confirmation bias and selective processing are ways our brain convinces us to do something we fundamentally know is wrong. Roughly two thirds of executives only consider ONE course of action when making a decision. Adding options increased the likelihood of success. With only one option you will explain away the negatives. With multiple options you can make a proper choice.

Another consideration is the integration of scenario based training into your own leadership practices. Create scenarios and have people think them through. The resulting conversation accelerates their move up the learning curve and makes your life easier.

Finally, there is a school of thought that says there are no bad decisions..only ones that would have been better had more information been available or if the person was able to process the information available in a better way.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 25th, 2013 at 2:06 am and is filed under Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.