Decision making is a critical leadership skill. Use your decision making abilities in and out of the office to improve both your work and personal lives. People making good decisions inside and outside the office derive many benefits. Learning to make good decisions is a first step to becoming a well respected leader.

There lots of benefits of being more decisive. Making conscious choices allows you to shape your life path reflecting your values and priorities. Without taking action, you find yourself drifting through whatever circumstances come along. Learn to set goals and develop action plans to achieve those goals. Writing down a plan of action for a goal is easy. Choosing to implement the action steps is what make your dream reality. There is lots of information available in the internet about setting and achieving goals. I contributed some of that content by sharing things I do to accomplish my goals and dreams. Here is a link. https://christopherstcyr.wordpress.com/2014/01/01/time-to-reflect-plan-act/. 

Some decisions should be delayed, but most can be made quickly. Making decisions at the correct point frees the time by avoiding waffling that robs not only your valuable time, but also energy. Avoid going back and forth over the same options. Making a decision at the appropriate time eliminates stress, confusion and anxiety you feel about making mistakes. Most decisions fail to work out as planned requiring adjustments along the way. Taking greater control builds your trust with others and your confidence to make good decision. Decision-making skills are like exercise. When you exercise more, you develop fitness factors that increase your physical ability. Making decisions increases your self-confidence and your ability to make better decision. You create positive momentum because it’s easier to make decisions when you believe in yourself and your abilities.


Every time you make a decision, you learn. You learn about how your decision affects others. You learn what information is important when making future decisions. You identify sources for help and advice. Your choices reveal your character to yourself and others. A big lesson learned is how your willingness to learn from adversity provide valuable feedback about areas you can improve.

Becoming more decisive is simply a decision, your first important decision to be more decisive. The most difficult time in any moment of decision is the space between deciding to do something and making the first step. Law enforcement calls this space the Fatal Funnel. It is that space between being outside of a key engagement area such as a room, and being in the engagement where you gain control. It is like being in the doorway. You are neither in the room or out of the room, but that space is the most dangerous because you are completely exposed. As soon as you step left, right, or move forward, the danger decreases. Motivate yourself because once you take action, you recognize more opportunities. You can only see the doors in the next room by fully stepping through the door directly in front of you.

Generally one makes a decision because a problem or opportunity comes into your awareness. Do your research. The first step to making a good decision requires properly identifying the problem or opportunity. You requires the correct information to properly frame the situation. Obtain facts and figures researching on your own or consulting those with the relevant expertise.


You will never have all the relevant fact and figures available in a moment of decision. Learn to analyze the available information to develop reasonable assumptions. Plenty of analytical tools are available to reach reasonable conclusions. Learn what tools are available. Identify which ones work best in different situations. Each situation requires a unique solution, but frequently problems and opportunities fall into five categories; simple, complected, complex, chaotic, or disordered. Different skills are required for each category. Developing skills and understanding for each category is easily each a topic for additional blogs.

Start with small, simple decisions in areas where you feel confident and where the consequences are relatively minor. I encourage those who follow me to be brave, make a decision and learn lessons from the consequences good and bad. I frequently have new employees come to me with their tails between their legs because a decision they made went wrong. My first question always is, “Did someone die, become seriously injured, or did something blow up or become seriously damaged?” Most of the time the answer is no. That means we have time to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. This allows employees to practice and work their way to more significant decisions. Working through the problem or opportunity with them builds their confidence. Trust your judgment and accept any consequences or criticisms that may arise in order to learn important lessons for future decisions.


Making timely decisions is important. Give yourself a timeline, but do not make it artificially short. If you have 12 months to find a speaker for a training conference, identify when you need to make that selection. Speaker bureaus may require three to six months notice for most speakers. That provides you up to nine months to complete your research which includes the perimeters such as cost, expertise, and other requirements for the speaker. In fact, the first step in your research requires you to identify what information you need to gather to decide who your speaker should be. That means you probably should not select the speaker in the month following the date you were assigned to make a selection. Use the time to gather facts and information. However, do not put off a decision of little consequence that can be made today, such as the pattern of the paper plates for the snack table. Use more time to make a choice for those decisions of great consequence. Do not waste time with decisions of little consequence. Learn the difference between the two.

Face your fears. You will make mistakes. Baseball players who only hit a base hit three times for every ten times they face a pitcher receive large paychecks. They fail 70% of the time! There was a time Babe Ruth held the record for the most home runs batted in Major League Baseball. He also held the record for the most strike outs. Tim Ferris claims to periodically go without food for days while sleeping in a tent at night to remind himself that if a decision he makes results in the loss of all his wealth, he can still survive even if it means not having food for several days and sleeping on the ground. Fear of making mistakes is a barrier to becoming more decisive. Mistakes are a part of life. Unfortunately people often learn more from failures than from victories because they analyze what went wrong when they fail, but rarely analyze what went right when they succeed.


The best way to become decisive is to decide to make decisions. Decision making is a skill required of all leaders. Leaders who make decisions develop a reputation as being decisive. Every time you make a decision, you learn from your mistakes and successes. Making decisions is simply learning a process then accepting the results of the process and acting on them. Decide to be a respected leader by making decisions.

Photo Information

All photos from pxhere.com used with a 0CC license.

The Cynefin Model graphic was created by the author and is based on the work of David Snowden and Mary Boone.  For more on this model read A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making at https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making.