It is easy to rely upon intuition to make important decisions—but treating decision-making as a skill can allow leaders to avoid the dangers of bad gut reactions.
Key Details
- Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is a leadership consultant and the author of Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions And Avoid Business Disasters.
- In a recent opinion piece for Forbes, Tsipursky discusses his process for how leaders should make smart and informative decisions.
- He says that decision-making is a teachable skill and that learning to follow his process will help leaders avoid the pitfalls of gut-level thinking.
Why It’s Important
Many prominent leaders rely too heavily on gut reactions and intuition in their leadership decisions. This can work, but the results are never as strong well-informed decisions backed up by research and forethought. Changing your decision-making process can allow you to see hidden possibilities and make the wisest decisions.
“Making the best decisions is seen as the key characteristic of top business leaders: why else is ‘decision maker’ synonymous with ‘leader’? Unfortunately, leaders overwhelmingly fail to get professional development in their decision-making process. Yet research in behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience showing that even one training session can significantly improve one’s decision-making ability,” says Tsipursky.
Tsipursky’s eight-step technique is called “Making the Best Decisions.” It requires at least 30 minutes of planning and revision, which he says can save time, money, and emotional grief if well implemented.
Key Takeaways
- Identify the need for decision-making and take the initiative to decide what is the best step forward.
- Become informed, gathering relevant information and useful sources from opposing perspectives.
- Imagine your goal and paint a clear picture of the direction you want to take.
- Weigh your options, and use the data you gathered to make a process criteria.
- Generate various options that will allow you to pursue your goal differently.
- Pick the best of the options you’ve created, considering each in a harsh light and avoiding initial preferences.
- Implement your best plan, taking into account how it will be kept accountable by your team and how to avoid failure.
- Evaluate the implementation and make changes depending on how it has worked.
