Decision making

A quick Google search of how many decisions a teacher makes in a day will tell you 1500. Leaders of any group of people (businesses, schools, classrooms, or families) all need to make hundreds of decisions each day. While most of them ultimately can be meaningless, just the sheer amount of decisions can wear us down. That's one of the reasons to get the most important things you need to do first, so you have the energy and brainpower to complete them well when you can.

The worst ways to make decisions are when your will power is low, you have no one to bounce ideas off of, or you are in a hurry. Emergency decisions usually lead to being taken advantage of, not considering unintended consequences, or a fix for now that leads to more work, time, energy, and money down the road.

Decisions need to be principled, and centered around values and priorities. One of the primary skills of marketers and salespeople is to give the sense of scarcity to make you buy something you wouldn't, or pay more for something than you normally would for fear of missing out. When someone is making you feel rushed in your decisions, you need to force yourself out of the scarcity mindset and take a step back. Do you really need to make the change someone is asking you to make? What will accepting or denying something do in the short term and long term? How does the decision fit into your current goals, priorities, and strategies. 

Tell people that you are making a decision for that you will need some time to consider. Give them a reasonable amount of time, and then think through what are the advantages and costs to both approving or not? Is there a middle ground, or even a better approach to getting the answer the person wants than what they are thinking. Most of my leadership decision making has been about approving what my people are asking for, but oftentimes coming up with a different approach than the one they first proposed. 

These changes in approach are often times due to resources available, or in taking an approach that not only will get the person asking closer to what they want, but help get others on board to support the idea. Sometimes it is to make sure I communicate with people that will be impacted by the approach I take. In that communication, those people often come up with a small tweak of their own that makes the final plan even better.

Big decisions cannot be made by yourself, or in a hurry. If you allow that to happen, you need to own the fallout and be ready for harder work down the road. My father has a saying of, "If you don't make time to do something right the first time, you will find the time to do it a second." That is true in many areas of life, and especially with decision making.