This month Dave is primarily discussing leaders making decisions.

We all make many decisions on a daily basis, and for most professionals in our personal lives, a large percentage of those would be considered “good” decisions.  So why would we cover decision making in a leadership development program?  In our workshop this month, we covered a couple of scenarios and asked our participants what decision they would make.  Not surprisingly, we wound up with a couple of different responses, some of which were opposed to each other.  In our businesses, wouldn’t we want a high percentage of decisions to be “good” decisions?  How do we get more people to more consistently make “good” decisions for our organizations.

Decision making is a learned process.  Decision making is the process of identifying and choosing alternatives based on values, preferences, biases, and beliefs.  What’s critical about this definition is appreciating that if every employee makes decisions using their personal values, preferences, biases, and beliefs - those decisions might not align with your companies values, preferences, biases and beliefs.  

There are four enemies of decision making - limited perspective, confirmation bias, emotional bias and time.  Limited perspective is seeking the opinions of other stakeholders in the process to verify, compliment, alter, or amend your decision to improve the overall outcome.  Confirmation bias is our natural tendency to acknowledge information which matches our thought process, and discount information which contradicts it.  Emotional bias is our tendency to not implement decisions which might be considered unfavorable by one group or another, or for which there may be repercussions, or other negative feedback as a result.  And finally, time - either not enough or too much, can impact the effectiveness of the decisions we make.

To learn more about how to help your team make good decisions, listen to this segment on Michigan Business Network.