Every day we face having to make decisions. Why do some decisions come easily and others we struggle with; at times even avoiding making the decision altogether? Over the last couple of months, I have had several big decisions to make about my business. If you asked me I would say that I don’t often have difficulty making decisions but not so the last couple of months.
Well, I finally came to decisions on all fronts, though not easily. So this week I thought it would be worthwhile to discuss how to make decisions, as we all wrestle with them at times.
1. Identify the issue or decision you need to make. Sometimes we can’t decide because we aren’t clear about the issue. For example: As a manager, you have an employee who isn’t performing. You’ve had several conversations with them and nothing changes. Now you are considering termination. But maybe the decision isn’t whether to terminate or not. Maybe the decision is to determine if this employee has skills that may be of value to the company in another area.
Or maybe it’s to determine what’s interfering with their performance…training, ability, motivation, etc.
2. Determine the impact if nothing happens or changes. One of my decisions involved my website. If I did nothing I would have the same challenges, not enough people buying products (or less than I ideally wanted). The impact of this was that I wouldn’t meet my IP goals or my long-term passive revenue goals and the revenue would have to be made up from services.
It wasn’t catastrophic but it didn’t take me where I wanted to go. Understanding this helped me make the decision.
3. What is the ideal outcome and what would be an acceptable outcome? Sometimes we struggle because we want perfection and don’t believe it’s possible. Or we are stuck on just one outcome without considering other possibilities.
Using the example from #1, an ideal outcome would be to have this employee be productive in their current role.
Other acceptable outcomes might be moving them to another role where they could be successful or providing training for 90 days to determine if the problem is training. Termination might be the last resort decision.
4. Determine what steps you need to take. In my situation with my website, I had several steps I could take. Example: Identify resources to audit my site and see if there were any consistent themes in their recommendations. Determine how much I was willing to pay to solve the problem. Understand what I could expect as outcomes if I invested X dollars etc. etc.
Some decisions don’t require steps per se but many can be broken down into steps that help you decide.
5. Commit to action. Consider the most important step you could take to move this issue towards a decision and take it.
Napoleon Hill said, “Nothing happens till a decision gets made.” Once you make the decision don’t keep second-guessing yourself.
We all make imperfect decisions as we can only make them with the data we have at the time we make the decision. Just make a decision, you’ll feel so much better.
Do you make decisions mostly based on facts, intuition, or a combination of both?
Are you sure you really know the answer to this?
Take our decision-making quiz and find out.
