Being a leader means you are going to have to make decisions. You can’t sit on the fence or allow fear or inertia to prevent you from taking action. Your decisions won’t always be correct but you must be willing to make them and you must be prepared to be wrong and accept responsibility for any consequences.
There’s an old saying; “a 90% solution on time is better than a 100% solution too late”. I tend to agree with this statement and have applied it to great effect over many years. There is another interesting fact about decisions. They’re seldom 100% correct and almost never 100% wrong. This means your decisions are likely to be praised by those who agree and ridiculed by those who don’t.
Making a decision and acting on it doesn’t mean you are right, but it does mean you must be willing to be wrong. We don’t always have all the information or time needed to make the perfect decision, so we need to learn how to commit to the ‘least worse decision‘ based on the best information available at the time.
Leaders have to be willing to make a decision and stick to it. My caveat for this is “make the RIGHT decision and stick to it”.
So how do you that?
Good decision making is a critical skill for any leader. It’s well documented that most people are not rational when it comes to making decisions and most decisions are emotionally driven and based on individuals or group biases disguised as ‘experience’. You only have to look at the current geopolitical decisions being made by leaders who are not thinking critically and are being pressured by group bias and emotion, to see how bad this problem can get.
Leaders need to hone their decision-making skills and one of the best ways to do this is through the study and application of critical thinking. I highly recommend to anyone responsible for making decisions, that they read Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow”. I also recommend “Think Smarter” by Michael Kallet as it provides some very practical ways to apply critical thinking to decision making. Leaders need to lead with less emotion and cognitive bias, and more critical thought and logic. This is the foundation of good decision making.
At the same time, leaders need to have the courage to lead and that means they must be prepared to make decisions. Collaboration is important but, in the end, if you are in charge you better be prepared to stand up and make a decision, or get out of the way and let the leader make it for you!
