Lesson 6: Making Good Decisions

Video

Making Good Decisions

As a leader, you will be tasked with making decisions constantly - some trivial, some tremendously important. The difference between the two can be hard to understand in the moment, because the effects of a decision are sometimes unclear until much later. What looks minor today can compound into something significant. What feels enormous in the moment may resolve quickly.

Good decision-making is a skill. It can be developed. The foundation is understanding what makes decisions hard and building reliable habits for navigating that difficulty.

What Makes Decisions Hard

Most decisions that trip leaders up share some combination of the following:

• Incomplete information. You never have all the facts. You are always deciding with some degree of uncertainty.
• Time pressure. Good decisions take time to think through, but often that time is not available. The skill is making good decisions fast, not making perfect decisions slowly.
• Competing interests. Different stakeholders want different things. The right decision for the team might not be the most popular one with leadership, or vice versa.
• Emotional loading. Some decisions are hard not because the analysis is difficult, but because the consequences are uncomfortable - letting someone go, ending a project, or telling a stakeholder something they do not want to hear.

Rules of Thumb

Making decisions is situational by definition, but the following rules of thumb will make your decisions more likely to result in positive outcomes:

1. Decide in a timely manner. Chronic indecision is costly. Teams that wait for perfect certainty often find the decision gets made for them - by time, by events, or by someone else. A good decision made promptly almost always beats a perfect decision made too late.
2. Decide as close as possible to the action. Use the best facts you can gather at the time. Make a quick inventory of what you know, what you do not know, and whether the missing information is obtainable before you need to decide.
3. The decision-maker should be accountable for the outcome. Decisions should be owned by the person who will live with the results - not delegated upward to avoid responsibility or downward to avoid blame.
4. Consult the right experts. Seek input from people with relevant knowledge or who will be affected. Sometimes this means limiting who participates in the process - too many voices can muddy the decision rather than sharpen it. Input is information; the decision is yours.
5. Consider both short-term and long-term implications. What solves the problem today may create a larger problem next quarter. Good decisions account for both time horizons, even if the short-term pressure is loud.
6. Address root causes, not just symptoms. This implies that the root cause is actually understood before deciding. If it is not, finding the root cause may need to come before the decision itself.
7. Consider holistic impacts. A decision that fixes one thing but breaks another is not a good decision. Think about effects on people, processes, other teams, and downstream systems before committing.
8. Communicate decisions clearly to the proper stakeholders. A good decision poorly communicated can fail just as badly as a bad one. Once you have decided, close the loop with everyone who needs to know - promptly and clearly.

Build the Habit Across Your Team

Stick with these rules of thumb yourself, and coach your team to do the same. Leaders who model good decision-making - and who create space for their teams to practice it - build organizations with strong, rational decision-making at every level. That compounds over time into a real competitive advantage.

A good way to develop this muscle is to review major decisions after the fact. Not to assign blame, but to ask: did we follow a sound process? What would we do differently? Over time, that reflection improves the team's judgment in ways that no framework alone can.

Delivering Results Assessment

You can use this assessment on a regular basis to check whether your time management skills are on point, or whether there are things you need to improve.

You can also use it to extract survey questions for others around you, to get some specific feedback on how you are showing up as a leader.