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Key Management Insights - Making Your Decisions Count

Guest post by: Martin Haworth

Article Overview: Our decisions shape the way we lead our teams. And for managers, there are always the same dilemmas that anyone faces with opposing evidence to sway us. There's a way to get it right much more often...

Key Management Insights - Making Your Decisions Count

It's quite simple, you have choices to make - often in the moment. The decisions that guide your actions are what contributes to the perceptions others have of you. The decisions you make, when you are in the place where you have to, cumulatively combine to be the person you are and the leader of others.

"The difference you make in the world is determined by the moment-to-moment decisions that you make."

Nelson Bowles, 'What Color is Your Parachute'

It's the behaviors that come from the decisions you make, that describes you to others, in turn dictating the results you achieve as a manager.

And it's worth considering, in those moments of decision, what is it that helps you get them right - at least most of the time? How do you go about choosing one path or the other as you decide? Indeed, who judges which is right and which is wrong at all?

The secret is that it's always about the ability to respond, rather than react, that makes the difference. It's about creating that space that affords you the luxury of an extra split second or two.

Responding is considered - even in the moment - thinking, that within the fragment of time you have is less reactive and therefore far less 'knee-jerk'. It's more mature, experienced and conscious than a hasty reaction.

Great managers work hard to develop that skill. They learn the ways to save themselves from disasters that so often come from reacting almost unconsciously, because they understand from the experiences they've had, just what will come when they act that fraction too early.

We have autonomic reaction mechanisms that enable us to move out of danger without thinking. We get our hand out of the way fast as the heat is felt, because we are programmed that way. It serves to protect us when we are afraid or feel in danger.

When we are making complex decisions that require conscious thought, we need to raise our consciousness game, such that we slow down a bit and create the space to consider the right response and not the wrong, hurried reaction.

In the bigger picture, it's the sum of all these responsive, rather than reactive decisions that makes us who we are and ultimately, how we each make a difference to others, to our businesses and shapes our contribution to the world as a whole.

Then the decisions will serve us well, rather than create more challenges than we started with.

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Article Tags: decision making, making decisions, management development, reactive, reactive decisions, response



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