Very often in a coaching process a coachee will say: “I need to improve my decision making skills.”  I get excited and follow up with a question: “How do you currently make decisions?” Depending on the coachee, at this point there is silence or a pause followed by: “hmm… interesting question.”  It seems that many leaders fail to understand how they make decisions which makes it difficult to communicate with their team members how or why a decision was made.  Often, the rationale for a decision is built from the decision itself i.e. this is how and why I justify this decision.  How would you be a better leader if you understood how you make decisions, what biases are built into your decision-making process and how can the team members support each other in decision-making? If you are looking for agility in the workplace, this is a topic that may interest you.

The first step is to crystalize the criteria you need to make a typical decision.  This is your decision-making model.  Of course, we face different kinds of decisions that will require tailored thinking but, in general, we tend to be comfortable to make a decision when we have “done our homework”.  This “homework” could entail answering questions like: