5 Steps For Improving Your Decision-Making Skills
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
In the workplace, the ability to make a timely and effective decision with the information available to you is vital. That’s true for all of us, but nobody more so than leaders, who are called upon to make high level decisions about strategy, people and budgets.
Despite its importance, it’s not carried out effectively. A McKinsey Global Survey on decision-making in the workplace found that only 20% of professionals think their organisations excel at decision-making, and majority say much of the time they devote to decision making is used ineffectively.
This is in-part because decision-making can be overwhelming without a proper framework to guide it. To improve your decision-making skills, consider the following steps first as a starting point.
Filter out noises
No decision could be made without information. However, as a leader, you have an overwhelming amount of information coming in all the time. That includes details you’ve been told about a situation, pre-existing knowledge, statistics and even intuition. Sometimes those sources of data seem to be at odds; other times, they come together. Indeed, the amount of information people are taking daily are five times more in 2007 than in 1986. When considering the information and data available to you, take a moment to examine their source and relevance. Is the push to upgrade your IT system coming from an objective analysis of its performance, or based on anecdotal evidence about the latest gadgets? When you’re considering someone for a promotion, are you looking at their performance metrics or being swayed by a personal connection or the opinion of others? The decision-making will be more accurate and timely if one can filter out noises and evaluate relevant information only.Be conscious of your own bias
What we call intuition, or ‘gut feel’, is often an umbrella term for various sources of knowledge including pre-existing beliefs, value structures and emotion. Some of that is valuable, allowing you to draw on pre-existing knowledge and pattern recognition in an instant. However, those instinct reactions are subject to various behavioural biases that could lead to sub-optimal decisions being made. For example, it’s well established that when we already hold a belief, we readily retain information that supports that belief, and ‘skim over’ information that doesn’t. This is the so-called confirmation bias. To avoid the tendency to confirm your pre-existing belief, ask yourself whether some of what you ‘know’ is in fact what you believe, or what you want to be true. When we rely too much on intuition, bias can creep in, leading to a poor decision. To achieve the best decisions, leaders should not only be aware of her/his own biases but also those of others. Read more: Six Cognitive Biases That Affect Your LeadershipPerform a situational analysis
A situational analysis will enable you to understand the complexities of the decision, who could be affected by it and how. Consider the following questions:- Why and who: Why does a decision need to be made, and who stands to be affected by it?
- Value vs cost: Do the costs of implementing the decision outweigh the proposed benefits, and what margin of error is there in the possible outcome?
- Evidence-based: Are you prepared to back up the decision in the face of opposition, and do you have the data behind you?