The Decisive Leader
Mastering effective decision making
The way that you make decisions plays a crucial role in setting the tone for your leadership.
The choices you make reverberate. And they set the course for your team, their morale, and long term business success.
The ability to make confident and timely decisions is a hallmark of effective leadership, and it is a cornerstone of executive presence.
But it isn't always an easy task.
The weight of responsibility on your shoulders, knowing that the future of your business and the personal and professional futures of your team depend on your choices, can be overwhelming.
The fear of making the wrong choice and facing its consequences can paralyse even the most experienced leaders, leading to over-analysis and inertia.
And hasty decisions, made too quickly, can bring regret and guilt that stay with you, shaping the way you deal with decisions and actions long into the future.
Yet for leaders today, decisions are merely a starting point, rather than the ultimate destination.
Consider a scenario where a leader makes a potentially high impact revenue generating decision, but fails to effectively communicate it to her team, resulting in a lack of buy-in, enthusiasm, and commitment. Regardless of the quality of her decision-making, its success is likely to be compromised.
It’s not so much the decision that you take, but what you do with it that counts.
Decisive leaders understand that decisions require action to drive results.
Whilst your decisions serve as a compass, establishing the direction you want to go, it is how you choose to communicate it, execute it and track progress as you go that will give you the true measure of success.
The decision itself is simply a commitment to the future you want to create.
"Unsuccessful people make decisions based on their current situations. Successful people make decisions based on where they want to be."
Anonymous
In business, decisiveness establishes direction, fosters a culture of action and lays the foundation for growth.
Here are five tools and thought provokers to help you bring more of that into your leadership today:
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Model: Everyone has preferred thinking styles and blindspots that can get in the way of making solid decisions. Perhaps you are focussed on getting the fastest results, or perhaps you lead with how people feel, or simply what the data is telling you.
To help you leverage a wider range of perspectives and make well informed decisions, it is crucial to look at decisions from different angles.
The Six Thinking Hat model by Edward De Bono offers six distinct types of thinking and perspectives.
Blue Hat: organisation, process and planning
Green Hat: creative thinking, innovation
Red Hat: feelings and instincts
Yellow Hat: benefits and values
Black Hat: risks, difficulties and problems
White Hat: information and data
Which hat do you primarily think with? And which could your decisions benefit from more of?
Practice: Decisiveness, like any skill, can be developed through intentional practice. You don’t go to the gym and start by lifting the heaviest weights, you start light and build from where you are.
So, start small. Make a fast decision about where to eat lunch, or who to meet with.
“The way to develop decisiveness is to start right where you are, with the very next question you face”
Napoleon Hill
Choosing low stakes situations to practice will start to build your decisiveness so that when you need to make big decisions, you know how.
Putting it simply, the more you do it, the better you will get.
Act: A decisive leader understands that decisions require action to be effective and get the results you want.
Before committing to a course of action, ask yourself:
What is the first action that I need to take?
What is my first opportunity to do that?
Will I really do it?
What do I need to say no to, to ensure I can continue?
Vision: To make decisions based on the future, rather than where you are right now, project forward.
Think of a decision you need to make today and the options available to you:
Take each option in turn and imagine that you chose that path. And that it was successful.
What would the future that this creates look, feel and be like?
Then ask yourself: which of these possible futures aligns with the vision you have for your work and life?
Which will you choose?
Learn: One of the primary barriers to decisiveness is the fear of making mistakes. Embracing a growth mindset and reframing failures or mistakes as learning opportunities can help.
Because sometimes decisions won’t work out. Regardless of how much energy you invest in trying to make your decision stick.
But for leaders who have a perfectionist streak, who believe that things should be perfect first time round, seeing failure as stepping stone to success can be tough.
Here are six tools to help you get more comfortable with failure and overcome the fear of making mistakes:
The Art of Failing Well
