Most people in leadership roles feel a sense of obligation to those they serve. Those who do not tend to be ineffective and their incompetence will show-up in the dysfunction of the organizations they lead. There are exceptions where a strong organization overcomes the deficiencies of a weak leader. This problem generally rectifies itself when the organization eventually installs a competent leader or its decline and ultimate demise. In my experience, nearly every leader wants to be a good leader, if not the best leader they can be. They look beyond the rights and power that their position offers and see that they have enormous responsibilities.<\/p>\n
The most significant responsibility for leaders in any modern business organization comes down to the decisions you must make. Running any business involves a cascade of decisions that range from rote operating procedures to those that literally can mean life or death for the organization. While leaders can and should delegate most of the organization\u2019s routine decisions through policies and shared authority, there are always critical and highly consequential decisions that fall onto the shoulders of whoever sits at the top of the org chart.<\/p>\n
The real test of your leadership comes down to the quality of collective decisions you make. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
How much people like or admire you mean little if you cannot ensure that the organization can maintain a sustainable competitive advantage. Leadership is not about being liked or hated but about being respected. A leader\u2019s integrity is always on display but shows up most clearly in the tough decisions you must make. Every right decision will not yield a good result, but bad decisions that do work out will still undermine people\u2019s confidence in your ability to lead and their respect for your leadership.<\/p>\n
Decision-making is an art. It requires judgment, and your judgment is informed by a combination of your experience and your beliefs. <\/span><\/h2>\n
There is also an element of science in many of the deductions you make. There may be hard data from numbers that represent measurable facts and statistics to guide you. You can calculate risk and hedge bets. You can even test assumptions. But in the end, it is not the data or science that yields a decision; it is how you interpret that data. How you feel about what you know will determine how you choose to act. The best decision you make might be not to trust the information you have. This is what competent leaders do.<\/p>\n
You can see this play out in the ethical arguments surrounding things like autonomous cars. Artificial intelligence can outperform the human mind in assessing conditions and risks but is often at odds with what your own judgment might employ to override the calculable best scenario. An ethical argument exists that AI would calculate a course of action that would minimize the number of deaths in an unavoidable collision. The algorithm would unemotionally choose that a single pedestrian is killed over a group of two or more. But what if that one pedestrian is a pregnant woman? Is she not two beings? Or, if the two pedestrians were alert and highly athletic and more likely able to either escape contact or possibly survive? It all comes down to judgment. Some scientists argue that removing the bias that clouds our judgment in favor of emotionless decisions ultimately yields the best outcomes. But who is to judge that?<\/p>\n
It may be that emotions are critical to making the best decisions. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Apart from psychopaths who cannot connect emotions to their actions, we all rely on our emotional intelligence when assessing options. To illustrate this, consider highly trained soldiers in the special forces. Their training involves selecting-out people who do not display the enormous discipline required to follow orders and perform missions under extremely dangerous and stressful conditions.<\/p>\n
The misconception is that you must suppress your emotions to perform in conditions where any hesitancy is likely to mean failure or death. There is a presumption that emotions cloud your judgment and may cause you to hesitate. And it is true. But it is also true that it is an extreme level of emotion that allows you to not<\/em> hesitate under stress and keeps you on task.<\/p>\n
Emotions are manifestations of your beliefs. They are how you feel about things based on what you believe, and you prioritize your habitual beliefs to form your values. The values that guide these elite soldiers is their sense of duty. Their beliefs are forged around their duty to God and country and a sense of purpose that piques their conscientiousness to a level that they are willing to place their own lives in danger because of what they perceive to be a cause bigger than themselves.<\/p>\n
The emotions driven by this sense of honor, even in the face of their own possible death, causes them to place their mission\u2019s success above the value of their own lives. We call this bravery, and it is certainly not the work of a psychopathic, who might kill indiscriminately. On the contrary, the training rigorously roots out anyone with any degree of psychological defect. These soldiers must be reliable to a fault.<\/p>\n
Very few business leaders receive any meaningful training when it comes to the art of decision-making. <\/span><\/h2>\n
You might have studied management theory or the thinking of successful leaders. But an intellectual understanding of things rarely prepares people for applying theory to solving actual problems. Learning simulations might be helpful, but nothing replaces the judgment that you develop through real experience. And experience alone will not prepare you for every decision you must make: the experience must be the right<\/em> experience, meaning relevant to your immediate wants, needs, and problems.<\/p>\n
To provide some clarity and context: wants or desires are outcomes you would prefer, but you do not deem as absolutely necessary; needs are outcomes that impact your ability to accomplish things that speak to your cause in life or sense of purpose, and problems are simply anything that other than what we want or need it to be. In this sense, problems are in and of themselves neutral. Good problems are those that we can use to see our way to opportunities and bad problems that stand between us and our aims in life. Problems do not exist until or unless we define them as such. It is why we can observe that the problem you solve is always the problem you name. And why one person\u2019s problem can be another person\u2019s opportunity.<\/p>\n
It is directing an action in one direction and cutting off all other options. We think of decision making as a deliberate action; something you would be wise to give some thought to before doing. But many decisions are based on habits and made with little or even no forethought. We make hundreds of such inconsequential decisions every day. But tough decisions are those we must think about in order to sort options that are either difficult or not obvious or involve serious consequences. And many consequential decisions come to you by force, meaning you have no choice but to make a decision, and that not making a decision is, in fact, a decision none-the-less.<\/p>\n
Making decisions is always an act of problem-solving. Some decisions solve small problems like how many times to hit the snooze button on your alarm before getting out of bed or vexing problems that might impact the livelihoods or perhaps even the lives of a large number of people.<\/p>\n
Deciding whether to eat your peas before or after your potatoes or mashed together generally has little consequence, unless someone is keeping score of your dining manners, but choosing to follow dietary advice dispensed from a qualified medical provider in response to serious health concerns could literally be a matter of life or death. We make decisions about what and how to eat all the time. Still, unless you see you need to solve a problem that is meaningful to you, you are unlikely to make a full-throated, deliberate decision that takes full account of your circumstances. Leaders are hardly immune from the nasty habits of procrastinating and avoiding decisions that they don\u2019t want to own. That is why Dr. Lee Thayer suggests that \u201cpeople prefer problems they cannot solve over solutions they do not like.\u201d<\/p>\n
The word decision literally means \u201cto cut off.\u201d <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The act of cutting anything typically requires at least some skill.\u00a0 Like any action you undertake, you can generally improve your performance by developing and honing the skills associated with your efforts. Learning to snip a string with a pair of scissors requires far less skill than what a surgeon delicately performs with a scalpel to remove a brain tumor. The level of seriousness surrounding the consequences involved informs the need for developing the right competencies. Competencies speak to the knowledge, skill, talent, and experience or credentials required to perform any task you undertake adequately.<\/p>\n
Some of the broad skills that solving problems requires include observation, assessment, reasoning, and effective communication. Executing decisions also requires managing and prioritizing things like time and resources. Softer skills like intuition, persuasion, and creativity also play into your effectiveness as a decision-maker.<\/p>\n
It would seem logical, then, that practicing these skills should improve your abilities. The problem is that practice does not make perfect; it only makes things permanent. Unless you practice the right things, you will not improve your competence. Not knowing what to practice is where you are most likely to struggle: most people don\u2019t know what they don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n
There are five qualities or competencies that you can focus on that will improve your decision-making skills.<\/p>\n
\n
- Curiosity<\/u><\/strong>.<\/span> Most people would prefer to have the benefit of certainty to support the decisions you make. But when you must make truly critical decisions, absolute certainty is generally in short supply. Like perfection, which you are wise not to allow to interfere with progress, waiting for certainty can lead to catastrophic hesitation or even operational paralysis. Even worse is the tendency to reach for false certainties that lead to bad decisions – rather than accept that uncertainty is unavoidable. The only proven antidote for uncertainty is curiosity. The quality of your questions will invariably prove more valuable than the certainty of your answers. To be a maker of good decisions, you must get out of the knowing-mode and learn how to operate in the learning mode, which means resisting the need for certainty about what you think you know. Moreover, curiosity is the root of creativity. More and more, decisions you face require creative leadership over reactive or command-and-control approaches. Great decision-makers are great question-makers.<\/strong><\/li>\n
- Caring<\/u><\/strong><\/span>. What you care about matters. Decisions are always at least partly made in our gut, which means that our values – or what we care about guides how we think and choose to act. You must know how you feel about the choices you have to make and communicate what you feel to those you collaborate with, delegate to, or influence through your role. Those who willingly follow your decisions will judge you for your conscientiousness; how your actions align with your stated beliefs and values. Your conscience guides you to place the needs and interests above that of your own. It informs your grit – the ability to get comfortable being uncomfortable and do whatever is possible in pursuit of your aims. People will easily discern what you care about based on the actions you take.\u00a0 How you feel informs how you think, and how you think defines who you are in the eyes of those you depend on and who depend on the decisions you make as a leader. More importantly, who you are determines if and how you will execute the decisions you make. A decision made and not acted upon is worse than having made no decision at all. Like your words, your feelings have consequences.<\/strong><\/li>\n
- Courage<\/u><\/strong><\/span>. Facing especially tough decisions might test the courage of your convictions. Fear of being wrong or of failing can distort your reasoning and your resolve. And the fear of being rejected or alienated due to either a good or bad decision might make you struggle when solutions to problems tend to be unpopular. Learning to lean-in to your fears is essential when facing the uncertainties of what you do not or cannot know. But most difficult choices don\u2019t require the kind of heroics we associate with staring down an adversary. The challenge you face may emanate entirely from within yourself. It takes a certain courage to push beyond the self-imposed boundaries of your comfort zone. This kind of growth is needed to embrace uncertainty and acknowledge that your fear does not have to be a limitation only happens when you get comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable.<\/strong><\/li>\n
- Clarity<\/u><\/strong><\/span>. You must solve problems that challenge your abilities and resources with decisions formed by widening your perspective. It is not just Einstein\u2019s definition of insanity (repeating the same action and expecting a different result) that is at play. The need for creativity and collaboration requires a level of trust in your instincts and trust in others\u2019 input. Gaining clarity often brings you to a place that makes you uncomfortable and forces you to summon your courage. Your ability to visualize different angles requires that you are able to decenter yourself; view the problem from a vantage point that may even reveal that you are the problem \u2014or at least part of it\u2014gaining clarity when your own thinking is muddled or when it is hard to place your trust in things that others see that you do not, requires setting yourself firmly into learning mode. The things that obscure your vision are often limiting beliefs about what can or cannot be. You override the obstacles in your way by being willing and prepared to learn something new, something that can shift your own beliefs about the situation before you. Dr. Wayne Dyer, generally considered a self-help guru, twisted an old phrase and got it right: it\u2019s not that you believe things when you see them; you see things when you believe them to be possible.<\/strong><\/li>\n
- Confidence<\/u><\/strong>.<\/span> There is an important distinction between being certain and being confident. With certainty about the right answers, it is easy to be confident. But it is not having certainty that is most often what causes a decision to be challenging. You might be certain about the course of action but unsure how it will be received by those it impacts. Or sure that people will understand your choice, regardless of the outcome, and still be uncertain about your ability to solve the problem. Confidence is the ability to take action when you do not have full certainty. There is a danger when your thinking becomes intoxicated with hubris, and you alienate the people you need as resources at your disposal. You need intellectual humility to admit to yourself and then to others what you do not know. Even in your decisiveness, you can and must remain curious and vigilant as to consequences. Confidence is a product of competence. You must be clear as to what it is that must be accomplished by the decisions you make. It may be defensible not to know how to do something, but there is no defense for not knowing why it must be done.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
These 5 C-Level secrets for leading better decisions are all qualities that, to some extent, exist in you right now. It\u2019s a question of \u201chow do I develop what I need?\u201d Just taking inventory of what you need will not elevate your performance. You must decide to prepare yourself to be a better decision-maker. Doing this includes focusing on things like becoming masterful at asking better questions. You must also find the vulnerability and humility you need to accept what you do not know so that you can learn the things you must know so that you might<\/em> make the best decisions possible.<\/p>\n
Elevating curiosity, caring, courage, clarity, and confidence starts with self-awareness and an honest assessment about where you are right now. Deciding to be better tomorrow than you were yesterday is an excellent place to begin the journey.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
You might be happy to discover that you do not need to go this road alone. You would benefit from having a cohort of leaders who share your need to develop their competencies and face the same kinds of challenges you do. As honest as you may be with yourself, there is no better or quicker way to gain clarity than from the unvarnished and unbiased observations of your peers. It is why leadership cohorts have been described as \u201cdecision-making machines;\u201d not because they make decisions for you, but because they enable you to make better decisions yourself. More valuable still, they support the kind of growth needed in all your competencies you need to be a better and more effective leader.<\/p>\n
Seeking a cohort of peers might be one of the best decisions you can make. At least it could be an excellent place to start.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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