My friend and colleague, Debs Jenkins, got me thinking with one of her recent newsletters. She proposed the idea of keeping a Little Book of Big Decisions. The idea is to record your decisions and periodically review them to see if you are making the same decisions over and over or letting important decisions languish. Intrigued to learn more about my own decisions, I took out a 5×7, placed it on the edge of my desk, and started my list…
We make decisions all day long and many are both important and time-consuming. In no particular order, here are the most common mistakes people make when making decisions:
I often help clients make complex and important decisions. Strategic planning, significant changes, and sensitive issues are the main situations where I am brought in. Inevitably, this includes working with a group of leaders who are the decision-makers and whose buy-in is critical to success. My clients are often amazed at how quickly I can extract significant insights and guide a group to critical decisions that they all support with great enthusiasm and commitment. Want to know my secrets?
Decisions are the forks in the road. We encounter them a thousand times daily, starting with the choice of ignoring our alarm or getting out of bed in the morning. And then we continue making decisions all day long – about clothes, hair, food, children, parents, pets, commuting, projects, customers, priorities, strategies, co-workers, money, technology, email, phone calls, plans, problems, investments, service providers, healthcare, and, finally, whether to watch one more show before bed.
When a client finally accepted that the root cause of their many struggles was that they keep hiring the wrong people, it was a major breakthrough. What will likely take even longer is for them to realize that they aren’t even qualified to hire the kind of people they really need! “How can we be hiring the wrong people when we hire such great people?” they demanded to know. Every one a top notch subject matter expert just like themselves. People with great experience and knowledge in the field. People who care as much as they do. And people who fit in really well. How could this be a problem? The problem they finally recognized is that by hiring people like themselves, they don’t really have people managers or project managers or product managers or branding experts or…
Even my best clients have been known to forget some of the most critical distinctions, so I thought some reminders were in order.
When stuck on a tough decision, even if using my process for SOARing through Decisions, stop and make a list of the fears, factors, and forces that are making it tough.
In my last newsletter, I wrote about “Metric Madness” at nonprofits. The very next day, a perfect example made its appearance in the Boston Globe: Study urges curriculum shift to aid Boston students’ success in college. In a nutshell, the Boston Public Schools decided not to require the state-wide MassCore college preparatory curriculum, reportedly because they thought it would hurt graduation rates.
When I sat down with three executives at a large international bank in London, I got an earful of frustrations. Determined, hard-working, ambitious people, who would like to accomplish more faster, are susceptible to frustration. It’s only natural. It is also the reason they were talking with me.
In a recent article of mine, “This Is Your Only Life. Are You Putting Yourself First?,” I encourage you to put yourself first because doing so not only makes you healthier mentally, physically, and emotionally, but it also makes you more productive and effective. One reader responded by saying the ideas were nice and simple in theory, but not realistic. He blamed the “work landscape” for making them impossible. I thought that reaction might be quite common and, thus, worthy of discussion. There are three problems with this reader’s response: