The ability to make the best decisions for the business sets great leaders apart from the rest. It may come naturally to some, but generally, this skill is something that must be sharpened, trained, and continuously exercised. A leader who lacks excellent decision-making skills can quickly pull a business down.
To make faster and more accurate decisions, sign up for coaching and decision training programs that will sharpen your critical thinking and problem-solving skills. You can also use decision-making tools. Immersing yourself in outdoor activities that put your skills to the test is also beneficial.
Let’s talk about the different techniques and tools you can employ to make faster and more accurate decisions, including group decision-making, coaching, and experiential training. We will also discuss the impact of investing in your own leadership skills so you can be more efficient in leading your organization through various challenges. Let’s also tap into some of the most common mistakes leaders make in decision-making and how to avoid them.
The Biggest Decision-Making Mistakes
Many people find decision-making responsibilities daunting, so it’s not surprising to see some who balk at accepting leadership roles. After all, when you’re a leader, your choices can mean failure or success for your business.
There are many mistakes leaders make when making decisions for their business. Being familiar with these is crucial so you know what to avoid to keep yourself from falling into the same traps.
Here are some of the biggest mistakes leaders make in decision-making:
1. Wishful Thinking
A positive mindset is commendable but isn’t always advantageous when it becomes your default perspective. Remember, never confuse optimism and wishful thinking with reality.
It’s similar to driving your car to work each morning. If you’re a morning person like me, you probably relish those early morning drives with the mild morning sun warming your face as you breathe fresh air.
However, you remain vigilant while driving despite feeling optimistic and excited about the day ahead. You take a defensive stance since you know accidents can occur in the blink of an eye — all it takes is one minor distraction, and your day could be ruined.
Sometimes, we amplify the favorable standpoints we see regarding specific issues in the workplace and practically disregard the negative points (the proverbial rose-colored glasses). You may also fall prey to self-deception if you refuse to consider the possible adverse consequences of a particular course of action you support.
This puts your business in danger because you fail to see the whole picture — one that includes both the good and the bad.
The best way to fight this tendency is to remain cognitive of your biases and quickly distinguish them from facts. Be as objective as you can be, rather than being subjective, when tackling critical decisions. Moreover, gather as many perspectives and alternative solutions as possible before making your final choice
2. Going Solo
Individual decision-making has its advantages. For one, choices are often made swiftly since there is only 1 perspective to be considered, and no consensus needs to be reached. Furthermore, accountability will be front and center since the organization will know who is responsible for the ideas and actions linked to the decisions made.
However, individual decision-making isn’t always beneficial in every situation. Sometimes, making decisions as a group is the best route to take, especially since more information, insights, and perspectives will be collected from various individuals. This gives the decision-making process a more holistic, inclusive approach where your chances of arriving at comprehensive, sound, and relevant choices will be boosted.
3. No Follow Through
Some leaders mistakenly think their job is done once they make their final choice. They may even feel proud and self-satisfied about this particular achievement, especially if meticulous research and attention to detail were ensured throughout the process. So, they proudly dust off their hands and move on to the next task.
However, your role as a decision-maker doesn’t end when you make your final choice. You must ensure proper and accurate implementation of your decision. You must also regularly monitor progress to ensure everyone is on the right track and the current action plan is still relevant and practical. This way, you’ll quickly nip potential problems in the bud and make the necessary adjustments to ensure efficient execution.
Benefits of Being a Good Decision-Maker
Decision-making is a skill we all use in daily life. Whether you decide to push through with the launch of a new product next week or wait until you see a more profound need in the market, you always strive to ensure that your choices will be most advantageous to the business.
Leaders seek to enhance their skills in making faster and more accurate decisions because this plays a vital role in pushing the organization forward and ensuring goals are met.
Let’s take a closer look at some ways excellent decision-making can benefit your business:
1. It Will Save You Time and Money
Without effective leadership, a team will have no concrete sense of direction. They will go about their own ways in trying to achieve set goals with little synergy and cohesion. This can result in the following:
- Mismanaged funds
- Improper use of resources
- Delayed output
- Costly errors
- Unproductiveness
Making faster and more accurate decisions will help your business save more time and money. Daily operations will be more efficient, employees can manage their time better, and goals will be realized through timely and systematic strategies.
2. It Will Train You To Become a Better Problem-Solver
As the saying goes, “Practice makes perfect,” and in decision-making, you have to get in the game if you really want to enhance your skills. You’ll become more adept in solving various kinds of workplace issues the more experience you acquire in decision-making.
Don’t be afraid to make mistakes — they’re part of the journey. Use them as learning tools through which you can glean invaluable expertise. Making mistakes can teach you to think outside the box, be more flexible, and unleash more of your creativity.
3. You Will Become a Better Leader
Leading a team toward success isn’t easy, but armed with the right skills, the experience will be highly worthwhile and rewarding. A leader’s decision-making skills don’t just come into play during critical moments when transformative choices must be made. They are necessary for the workplace’s daily routines as well.
A leader who can make fast and accurate decisions can:
- Promote teamwork and collaboration
- Improve employee productivity
- Enhance employees’ job satisfaction
- Promote organizational loyalty
- Inspire employees to always aim for excellence
If you’re eager to take your decision-making skills up a notch and would like to find out more about how doing so will positively impact your business, check out this article to uncover all the perks you and your team can enjoy. We’ll discuss the benefits in detail so you may truly grasp the value of excellent decision-making in leadership.
How Do I Make Better Decisions?
Making faster and more accurate decisions is perhaps every leader’s goal. It’s an enviable skill that will set you apart and significantly elevate your leadership brand.
Here are some ways you can enhance your decision-making skills:
1. Experiential Training
As a leader, you’ve probably gone through various trainings, seminars, and lectures about the value of decision-making in leadership. Concepts can be pretty easy to understand, but sometimes, the message can be more effectively absorbed if you get your hands dirty and gain firsthand experience with the theories being promoted.
Experiential training is a great way to do so because it exposes individuals to the unpredictability, inhospitality, and unrelenting nature of the wild. Nature can help sharpen your leadership competencies, particularly your decision-making, strategic planning, and critical thinking skills, by compelling you to think on your feet and become innovative in coming up with the best solutions for various dilemmas.
Here are some exciting activities you can engage in:
- Whitewater rafting
- Mountain Climbing
- Camping
- Hiking
- Skiing
Let’s take a closer look at how your experiences in the wild can benefit you and your team in the more controlled environment of your workplace:
- Provides hands-on training. You’ll go beyond just learning theories — you’re given opportunities to apply your learnings in actual scenarios.
- Promotes teamwork. The saying, “No man is an island” is highly apparent in the workplace where collaboration and cooperation can make a significant difference in how much more efficiently and swiftly goals are achieved. In the outdoors, teamwork is essential in ensuring everyone’s safety and success in reaching the goal.
- Sharpens other leadership skills. Listening, delegating, coaching, and collaborating are essential in managing a successful team. These skills can be effectively honed outdoors, and you can seamlessly transition from the wild to the boardroom.
Dive right into this article if you’re keen on training yourself to make better decisions through various strategies, including outdoor leadership. You’ll find out how activities like biking, camping, and mountain climbing can help sharpen some of your most critical leadership competencies, especially with making the most logical, relevant, and beneficial choices for your business.
2. Coaching
As a child, while growing up, was there someone you looked up to and constantly imitated in the hope that you’d be exactly like them? I remember being captivated by the idea of being a soldier. I would watch endless movies and read countless books about soldiers, and I would be in awe of how brave, gallant, and selfless they always seemed to be.
This is perhaps one of the main reasons I served for 12 years in the military. I was also fortunate to have leaders I could admire and emulate. In the military, I sharpened skills I never knew I would need beyond my life in the army — critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, conflict resolution, integrity, and decision-making, among others.
In decision-making, having a coach can make a huge difference in how well and quickly you develop the ability to make the right choices and effectively implement them. Poor decisions in the workplace often stem from:
- Inexperience
- Rushed decisions
- Insufficient know-how
- Overwhelming pressure
- Stress
- Poor judgment
By having a coach, you’ll have access to proven effective strategies and techniques that have helped countless business leaders in managing and leading their teams toward growth and success. A business coach or mentor can give you tips on how to:
- Refine your intuitions and impulses
- Identify your strengths and weaknesses
- Develop a keen eye for opportunities
- Improve your discernment
- Conceptualize your strategy for making rational decisions
- Maximize decision-making tools
3. Invest in Decision-Making Tools
Decision-making tools help leaders make faster and more accurate choices through more structured and streamlined processes. These can help them find the best solutions for their business’ problems and needs.
Decision tools can be counted on to:
- Help eliminate personal biases
- Provide a more objective approach to choosing the best solutions
- Identify opportunities
- Call your attention to the risks involved so you can formulate strategies to mitigate them
- Give a bird’s eye view of the current situation and potential alternatives and corresponding outcomes
- Provide visual representations of concepts and proposed plans of action
These are some of the most reliable tools that can help simplify and accelerate your business’ decision-making processes:
- Decision tree. Provides visual representations of alternative plans of action and their predicted outcomes.
- Decision matrix. A chart that offers comparative information on proposed alternative solutions.
- Force field analysis. Helps you weigh the strengths and weaknesses of proposed plans of action.
- Gantt chart. A project management tool that provides a graphic illustration of the project and tasks at hand so you can better monitor progress and make necessary adjustments quickly.
- Break-even analysis. A great tool to use for determining your margin of safety (where costs equal revenue) to help you wisely handle pricing and costs.
4. Develop Decision-Making Techniques
Decision-making techniques can help enhance your business’ decision-making processes, especially when implemented appropriately. As a leader, your ability to formulate innovative strategies to cater to your organization’s unique needs is vital in ensuring growth and success.
Good decision-making techniques help provide structure, so you’re essentially compelled to make rational, beneficial choices for the organization. They keep you from committing some of the most common decision-making mistakes — such as jumping on the bandwagon, allowing personal biases to take over, and trusting your gut too much — since these give rise to flawed, self-serving, and unfounded decisions that could put the company’s stability at risk.
Some of the most efficient decision-making techniques include:
- Multivoting. A group decision-making technique that helps address blindspots, boosts employee collaboration and morale, and promotes inclusivity.
- Six Thinking Hats. A technique that allows you to see multiple perspectives in a given situation. Participants are urged to view the issue from various angles (or “wear different hats”) so the team can discuss various essential points involving proposed courses of action, including strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and risks involved, and possible outcomes.
- Building consensus. This technique requires the team to agree on a given topic. They aim to arrive at a sufficiently acceptable decision for everyone, with nobody on the team completely opposed to it. This promotes group collaboration, accountability, buy-in, and commitment to the team’s decision.
- Visualization. This technique promotes a deeper and more accurate understanding of the concepts and ideas being shared. The most reliable visualization strategies include charts, graphs, dashboards, and tables.
- Situational approach. There isn’t a definite formula for making the best decisions for your business. You must learn to adapt to different situations so you can tailor-fit your approach depending on the unique circumstances you may find yourself in.
5. Group Decision-Making
Some leaders hesitate to promote group decision-making because they fear losing power, control, and authority over the team. However, making decisions on your own puts you at risk of fostering self-serving motives, non-inclusive ideas, and skewed standpoints.
Group decision-making allows the business to benefit from unique, creative ideas, diverse perspectives, and comprehensive proposals. It also motivates employees, fosters trust, and encourages everyone in the team to become critical thinkers and strategic problem solvers. It promotes sensible, inclusive, and logical decisions.
An organized, trackable method, with set rules and guidelines, will provide structure when making decisions as a group. Here are some ways you can go about it:
- Heuristic approach. This applies to repetitive tasks. It will save the group a lot of time because a standard, rule-of-thumb approach will be implemented each time a specific issue arises. This will be great for recruitment, inventory monitoring, and purchasing matters.
- Decision-making tools. These handy allies can simplify and accelerate the process for your team while ensuring objectivity and inclusivity. Decision intelligence tools ideal for small groups include decision trees, decision matrices, and influence diagrams.
6. Invest in Yourself
Decision-making isn’t an inborn leadership skill — it is something that can be learned and improved over time. Always keep in mind that when push comes to shove, your personal decision-making skills are your best bet in leading your business straight to the top.
You can train yourself to make better decisions through various means, including:
- Mentoring. Working with a mentor or someone you look up to in the industry is a great way to learn the ropes firsthand. A good coach or mentor will help polish your strategies, enhance your approach, and introduce you to new techniques to help you make faster and more accurate decisions for your business.
- Decision-making training. Leadership courses in decision-making will help sharpen your critical thinking, problem-solving, and risk assessment skills. This is a great way to better equip leaders to face the company’s future challenges.
- Outdoor training. The wild outdoors provides an excellent training ground for leaders, especially regarding decision-making. Nature’s unpredictability and inhospitality will compel you to become more strategic, calculating, and systematic when making choices that could spell the difference between survival and failure. Activities like biking, hiking, and camping will help hone your leadership skills.
Sancus Leadership promotes the value of excellent decision-making in leadership. We can guide you in enhancing your business’ decision-making process through tried-and-tested, tailor-fitted techniques that will make a difference in how you lead your team toward success.
Our experiential training courses, in particular, will compel you to get accustomed to thinking on your feet and making the best choices in various scenarios. Book us a free leadership call when you’re ready to experience the difference outdoor training can make in managing your business. We’re always eager to help leaders achieve their full potential!
Final Thoughts
Fast and accurate decisions can propel a business toward opportunities promoting growth and stability. This is especially advantageous for small businesses striving to carve out a niche in a demanding, fast-paced, and dynamic industry. Your decision-making skills as a leader will significantly affect how quickly and efficiently your organization can achieve its goals.
