How to Make Better Decisions as a New Leader

Learning how to make better and more-confident decisions is one of those fundamental skills, like communicating well, that will have an impact on every area of our lives.

If you know me you know I loath cookie-cutter frameworks that lack nuance & mask as widely applicable. I've yet to find a decision-making framework that I use religiously, but after a decade of holding positions that require consistently sound decision-making when the decisions are rarely obvious, while it's still an area I focus on, I've developed lenses and questions that fuel my thinking.?

Step 1: Understand the Purpose of the Decision

The first step in making a decision that accomplishes your desired outcome is understanding what that outcome even is.

You must be clear on what you / the team needs this decision to accomplish. Boil it down to its simplest form. Ensure there's alignment amongst everybody brainstorming solutions.

This feels obvious on the surface, but it’s easy to get so in-the-weeds of solutions that you lose sight of what you're really trying to accomplish. This lack of clarity is a pattern in organizations I come into; it’s difficult to have clarity — it requires both nuance & simplicity — but it’s critical.

If you ask yourself that question to attempt to understand what you need a decision to do for you and nothing comes to mind, well, then perhaps the decision can float off into the distance.

Step 2: Know Your Non-Negotiables

If you understand the purpose of the decision at-hand, it’s time to intertwine the most rigid bits of context around your situation into the picture.

Are there any non-negotiables at play? In other words, is there anything we absolutely cannot risk happening, or losing, or risk not happening that we need to build safety nets for? What’s our highest priority?

Without this step & the next, you may as well go on Google or ask somebody who has little to no context of your situation to make the call for you.

Step 3: Intertwine Other Important Priorities

Now that your clear on the objective and your non-negotiables, the most rigid pieces of your context are set and we can shift our attention to other context-specific nuances.

Not all important or note-worthy considerations deserve to be non-negotiables, but they also shouldn’t be ignored.

In postmortems, or post project reflections, I often call these miscellaneous but important considerations “Acknowledgements”.

What’s at play here that needs to be acknowledged & considered as we’re making this decision?

This can be anything, but common examples from my experience have been around the skillsets we currently have on the team, the place I’m at in my career / the stage of our company, our SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), and many others.

I often categorize my thinking in ‘inputs’, ‘outputs’, and ‘other’ here. Inputs are your costs like money, time. Outputs are the potential upsides / downsides. Other is anything else, mostly considerations around external factors like what’s going on the world / industry. Ideally, inputs don’t outweigh outputs, and considerations in ‘other’ help support your objective.

Step 4: Evaluate Your Tradeoffs

Ok, you know the highest-priority box this decision needs to check, you understand what you / your organization is not willing to budge on, and you’ve also acknowledged what other influences and context-specific considerations. Beautiful.

Now it’s time to widen the funnel and brainstorm solutions that both achieve the purpose of the decision, adheres to your non-negotiables, and acknowledges the other considerations you’ve deemed important.

The tradeoffs will likely be in how you balance / prioritize your other considerations. You shouldn’t be sacrificing on the core objective or your non-negotiables if you’re not forced to (sometimes, the best decision requires that you do, this is a difficult decision!).

For each path forward, you should be aware of the set of tradeoffs you’re accepting, and their implications.

What if there’s no clear choice?

It’s a joy when you understand your objective, and a decision present itself clearly that’s the obvious choice.

What’s more common is that two or three potential paths forward make sense, and there isn’t an immediately obvious choice, even after gaining clarity around your objective, non-negotiables, and other priorities.

This is where you need to make a decision that is thoughtful given the information you have available to you.

In my world, I often like to mitigate the possibility of catastrophe, prepare for the most likely downsides, have a high upside ceiling, and a few upsides I’m more certain about.

Here’s one way this all played out with a recent career decision.

Real-life example from my world

Before I embarked on a Director of Operations role at Forget The Funnel a couple years ago, here’s how those guiding principles helped fuel my actions.

Mitigate possibility of catastrophe: I began with a project-based contract as a good test run for the both of us, and the agreement that it’s a clean break if either of us don’t want to proceed beyond that. It’s enough time to get familiar with each other, but not enough time to feel like you’re trapped if it’s awful.

Prepare for the most-likely downsides:?In this example, the most likely downsides were around how challenging the work would be for me in a brand new industry (in addition to the relationship being not a fit, but I’d already planned for that). To prepare, I made a 30-60-90 day plan for my ongoing role that would start after the project-based contract was complete. We went over it during the initial project, which gave all parties more confidence in the transition.

Have a high upside ceiling:?I took the job partially because the upside ceiling was so high. If things went well, I loved the idea of helping to run that company (likely ceiling), from all perspectives.

Have a few upsides I’m certain about:?I knew this role would be great for me from a learning perspective, financially, and from a connections / networking perspective.

What were my other considerations? I was at a point in my career where I was seeking to expand beyond the fitness industry, and this was a very appealing opporutnity to do that. Additionally, I was at a point in my life where I didn’t have dependents, I could take more risks, and I could dedicate more time to my work without sacrificing other priorities in my life.

Also see: Want to Move on From an Important Role? Here’s an Exit Strategy

With that said, sometimes taking the biggest risks are necessary, and sometimes the possibility of the catastrophe come with that. I say that to say: just because it’s often my default to mitigate big risk and maximize upside within that, doesn’t mean it’s inherently right for all situations.

In a team, what if there isn’t consensus around a decision?

If you’re a part of team, it’s possible that a decision will be made that doesn’t have 100% consensus.

This isn’t inherently a bad thing, in fact, it’s common especially amongst challenging decisions.

As a leader: It’s difficult to make a call when the team isn’t in alignment on the path forward, but it’s part of our jobs.

Something I’ve found to work well in easing some of the finality of a decision is to communicate, “This is the decision we feel is best to achieve X & Y right now. We’ll be monitoring if our hypothesis is correct and if discover we’re not on the right path, we’ll adapt.”

Not only does this open up the possibility that the decision could be ‘wrong’, and builds a norm where that’s accepted & encouraged, but it shows humility and leads by example.

All you can do is accept the set of tradeoffs you think is best with the information you have available to you.

With that said, in the end, a not-infrequent byproduct of sound decision is emotion other than joy and excitement.

Sometimes it’s out of your control, sometimes there are opportunities for improvement, and almost all of the time there are both.

In closing

I hope you took away something useful from these reflections that you can use to make better decisions in your business, or in life. If you’re looking for additional support in building your business thoughtfully, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me here on LinkedIn, or at [email protected].?If I’m not the best fit for you, I’ll do my best to point you in a better direction.

This blog stemmed from a conversation during a client call. The video below is a series of clips from that call and shared here with permission.?