How to Improve your Decision Making Skill

Introduction 

Decision-making is the most needed and valuable skill in business and professional life. Effective decisions save the company’s time, resources, and lower the risk factor. That’s why businesses and companies value decision-making skills, it helps them to root out the problem before it rises up. Today, we’ll discuss how to improve your decision-making skill. 

What is a Decision Making Skill? 

Decision-making is the process of making a choice based on observation, assessment, and available information. The recruiting managers and hiring authorities look for decision-making skills among candidates at the selection time. Workers and employees have to make many small decisions throughout the day, and the effectiveness of the decisions improves productivity. 

How to Improve your Decision Making Skill 

When it comes to making a choice, the question is that how the executive would know the effectiveness of one decision over the other. If you’re wondering about these questions that how to improve your decision-making skill, we’ve gathered here some of the main suggestions and tricks in order to make a better choice. They’re as follows; 

Creating Virtual BOD 

When a company is going through a critical time, wrong decisions could be very costly. Timing also plays a significant role, the uncertainty, and every time you take have consequences. Virtual support decision technology creates a virtual board of directors, it allows them to experience the full spectrum of the situation and explore various other options in a collaborative way. 

Vision & Values as a filter 

When you’re making a decision, and then check it with the company’s vision and values. They would act as a filter and tell you what decision to take and what to avoid. It is important to keep in mind that you make a wrong decision sometimes. If it happens, remember that it’s a process and you learn from your mistakes. 

Deadline

The timing deadline for the decision is important, if it’s taking a longer time than expected, then you start 2nd guessing your choices. Therefore, you should set a limited-time deadline. After setting the deadline, search out relevant, gather facts to support the decision, and make the decision within the time frame. Working on the deadline is an art, once you start practicing the art, the experience would make you perfect. 

Avoid being Perfect

Everyone wants to make a perfect choice. There’s no such thing as perfect. The reality is sometimes you make good decisions, and bad decisions happen the other time. However, if you’re rarely making the right decision, then don’t be obsessed with it in terms of making the right choice. 

Recognize Who & Why 

If you want to amplify the decision-making capability of your company, then make sure who is involved in the decision-making team and why. If you’re making a decision that would impact the entire organization, then it’s significant that you should get many people involved in order to get various perspectives and do the voting.

However, if your decision is about a certain field that you don’t know, then you should acquire the expertise of a relevant professional in order to get a deeper insight. However, some companies follow the autocratic and authoritative decision-making style or in case of an emergency where your decision is final. 

Involvement of Right People 

When it comes to making a difficult decision, then it takes a lot of time for the management to choose. You have to be thoughtful and keep in mind the urgency of time. Smart leaders know how to choose the right team member that would prove fruitful. However, it doesn’t mean that you should go out and choose anyone to be your team member. You should choose only those people that would help you to amplify the quality of your decision. 

Check Bias & Prejudice 

Effective decision-making is one of the main traits of smart leaders. However, when leaders are facing extenuating circumstances with limited information, then they depend on their instinctive gut feelings as a shortcut. When you’re following your gut feelings, then you have to be critical of your thoughts, and make sure that your thoughts and views shouldn’t be bias and prejudice. 

Goals 

Managers and business executives should make their priorities straight like where you want to be and what you want to accomplish. However, when you have clearly defined goals and objectives both on the paper and verbally discussed, then it would make a difference. 

Your Formula 

As a leader, you should have a clear mind map/roadmap, matrix, or a formula that you would use to make a decision. When it comes to it, then you should follow the process and implement the procedure. It would help you to keep productivity in line. 

Antagonist

When you’re making a decision, and then make it someone’s duty to oppose the decision with a counter-argument. Their job should be to make the decision rejected, instead of offering a better decision. The criticism would make the team see a problem from various angles, and the decision-maker would learn a lot during the process of decision making. 

Rule of Ten 

You should be objective while making the decision and the final decision shouldn’t base on personal emotions. The rule of 10 would help you to be more objective in the process. By this rule, you analyze your business where the company would be in 10 days, 10 months, and 10 years if you follow a certain decision.

When you ask these questions, then you would realize that how it would make you feel about the decision. Acknowledging your emotions and not allowing them to compromise the decision. 

Stakeholders 

You don’t know what you’re going to do in a certain situation, and it annoys leaders and managers. It has created a mindset of self-protective and self-referential. Here you keep in mind the stakeholders that how they would perceive the decision and the company’s leader. 

Pressure Test 

People usually look at things from the upside or downside perspective while making a decision. However, they avoid analyzing the decision from the no-decision point of view. The decision would help you to find the timing of the decision and the difficult situation would change from wait and see the situation to C2A (call to action). If you don’t test your decision with situational pressure, then it won’t work. 

12-Step Method 

The 12-step is a war/battle test approach and faces unmanageable circumstances. When you put yourself in a life-changing situation, then you find insight in acceptance, courage in chaos, and strength in honesty. However, your superpower comprises connection and gratitude. 

Listen to Instinct 

Usually, we follow three approaches; brain, emotions, and instinct. The brain would make you things from the logical perspective, the heart allows you to see it with compassion and values, and gut feelings would make you see things from the core as self-protection. Therefore, you should keep in mind all these approaches and follow which suits your business best. 

What’s in it for me?

Decision-making is all about managing your self-interest, experiences, memories, and attachment to people. The first question you should ask is what’s in it for me by acknowledging your emotions to the other people relevant to the situation. 

Defining Problem 

Before making any decision, first of all, you should define the problem, situation, or scenario. It would help you to fully understand the problem, and then it would become easier for you to find possible solutions. 

Deciding Authority 

The leadership role and the decision-making authority are very important in the company. If you’re deciding for the team, then junior would come to you for more decisions. In other words, you’re increasing your responsibilities and reducing risk factors from their shoulders. Therefore, you should have clear defining roles and responsibilities in the company. 

Finding Solution 

When you’re solving the problem, and then look for alternative solutions. It’s because you can solve problems by various approaches. Therefore, you have to broaden your horizon and find multiple options. 

Weighing Risk 

Once you have multiple solutions to the problem, then you should check the riskiness of various options. The thing about decisions is that they’re like gambling, either your decision would work out or not. Therefore, you should make such a choice that has a lower risk of failure and losing resources. 

Conclusion: How to Improve your Decision Making Skill 

After an in-depth study of how to improve your decision-making skill, we’ve concluded that effective decision-making has vast application in professional business life. If you want to be productive by developing decision-making skills, then follow the abovementioned tips and strategies to polish your skill.