High Impact Leadership: What Impairs your Decision Making

Leadership is decisionship. We are required to make decisions all the time. Especially when we are in a leadership role, a lot rides on our decisions. Yet, decision making is something quite a few leaders struggle with. In most cases, they lack clarity and confidence to make and own their decisions. So where can one go wrong when making decisions? Here are 4 blind spots that can could impair your decision making. Paying attention to these can enable you to be at ease when making decisions and consequently make well informed decisions.

1. What’s the context? An important thing to be mindful of is the context of making the decision. Very often, we go headfirst without being clear on the context and why we are making the decision. The risk of doing so is that we aren’t fully engaged with the decision making process, and that may come in the way of us taking ownership of the decisions. Also, by not being aware of the context, it limits the information we have, and we might end up making an ill-informed decision. A great approach to overcome this blind spot is to ask yourself "Am I missing something here?" This helps you see the bigger picture.

2. Beliefs and Perceptions: Very often, our beliefs and perceptions come in the way of making effective decisions. It’s like seeing things with a filter on. What we see is influenced by the filter, which might skew oour view of reality. Hence, it is essential to be mindful of any such factors that might influence our decision making. A great way to overcome this blind spot and to think holistically is to ask yourself "How do I know this belief is true?" This gives you the opportunity to review your perceptions and potentially bridge the gap between perception and reality.

3. Assumptions over facts- How many times has it happened where we have made decisions based on certain assumptions, only for those assumptions to be untrue? And because of that, our decisions don’t turn out to be solid enough. This can be embarrassing at times, because this indicates lack of due diligence. As leaders, we are expected to be diligent at all times, so by not verifying our assumptions, we risk making poor decisions. The best approach to validate your assumptions is to speak to other people involved in the process and seek their input. This might help you uncover something that you might have missed out.

4. The impacts: Last but not the least, not thinking about the impacts our decision can severely undermine our effectiveness. Especially, when the decisions are linked to a change that we need to make. As leaders, our decisions have impact on our teams. Good as well as bad. By being aware of what those impacts are, who gets impacted and how helps us make decisions with a broader view. Not doing so can often cause discontent amongst people, and also creates a perception that we do not have their best interests at heart. Hence, it is imperative that we are mindful of the consequential impacts of our decisions.

Which of the above do you tend to struggle with when you make decisions? What other factors affect your decision making? How differently would your decisions play out if you had more awareness around these?