Leaders are encouraged to take action, sometimes with a limited amount of information. Risk goes along with making decisions without all the facts. Risk also accompanies with doing nothing or even making the easy decision that seems like it has no risk. We never know definitely if we are making the right decision, and it’s often only in hindsight that we are able to know if our decision was the right one. The inability to ‘know’ causes discomfort for most people and stress for many. To me, one of the business leadership skills we don’t teach is learning how to feel comfortable with being uncomfortable.

When I work with clients they often ask me to help them learn to make decisions without feeling uncomfortable about the decision or how they arrived at it. I tell them they will never get over the feeling of discomfort. Sure, at times they won’t feel this, but in life we simply never know for sure if we are making the right decisions. When we are faced with having to decide, we will examine the facts, draw upon our past experiences, ask other people for their insights, and some of us “go with our gut.” All of that helps us come to the conclusion we ultimately make, and we still don’t know without a shadow of a doubt that the choice we made was the right one.

I would be thrilled if companies understood this and taught their executives and managers that learning to feel comfortable with being uncomfortable is an important business leadership skill to develop. Instead we urge them to ‘get over their discomfort’ and move on. What if instead we help them realize that it’s actually acceptable to experience this discomfort or uncertainty, and the skill to learn is being with this natural and acceptable feeling? What if we acknowledged that there is no perfect decision, that we make them with the information we have at that point in time and some of them turn out to be brilliant and others don’t? I bet if we shared this point of view with leaders, then a whole lot more decisions would get made, many situations would get handled quicker and there would be less angst about the process or the result reached.

Next time you are considering business leadership skills to develop in your people, I encourage you to look at helping them learn how to feel comfortable with being uncomfortable. I expect you’ll see huge gains at many levels.

© 2014 Incedo Group, LLC