Is making decisions an art or a process? 3 simple steps to master it

Team managers and leaders make several decisions every day. Big or small. It may include everything from designing the goals for the next quarter to choosing the right candidate for their team. Managers are the ones who are armed with all the information and skills needed to make educated decisions that enable the progress of the team. 

The decision-making process involves choosing one alternative over the rest after a careful evaluation. This includes gathering the essential information and drawing comparisons after a detailed analysis. Afterward, you must act on the resultant decision and handle its effects. Your choices impact the whole team in many ways. At times, they can be the factor that makes or breaks the game for the team. 

While good decision-making opens avenues of growth for the organization, bad decisions can put you on the back foot by creating conflicts and harming the environment. 

Therefore, we cannot negate the importance of quality decision-making in any team. Although decision-making is a buzzword we hear often, you might be wondering what actually differentiates a good decision-maker from a bad one. And further, how can you become a better decision-maker as a manager? 

In order to understand this puzzle, you need to understand the top decision-making abilities which make all the difference. This includes improving efficiency step-wise. 

For instance, before beginning to evaluate the options, you can try to collect relevant data to support your ideas. In the later stages, you can include a decision audit process to gather findings about the impact of previous decisions. Such steps will help you fine-tune the strategy and increase efficiency. Focusing on these abilities during different phases of your decision-making process will help you bring a turnaround in your team. 

You can read more about the Top 6 Decision-Making Abilities You Will Need As A Manager to augment your process further. 

You might have noticed that decision-making involves putting considerable focus on the process. A set decision-making framework will help you immensely make your decisions efficient. When you guide a team, your context and critical values will remain constant, ensuring adherence to these can become a part of your framework. You can similarly develop a framework that suits your needs. Apart from making the process simpler, it will also help you add some speed. And, to take it faster further, you can turn to mental models. 

A mental model is a capsule representation of a big concept that simplifies decision-making. In common managerial parlance, it refers to the set of existing experiences and internal norms that a person uses as the basis for interpreting and understanding things and events around them. 

As it encompasses the person’s values, beliefs, and norms, a mental model becomes a handy guide in moments of confusion. In addition to being a frame of reference for managers, mental models also help streamline decision-making across the organization. 

You can learn more about How Mental Models Help In Decision Making As A Manager!

While making any decisions, we try to be our rational best. But, as humans, we tend to fall back to intuitions and heuristics without even realizing it. It might be a surprise that people use intuition much more than logic in decision-making. Our frameworks can suffer from biases that we see as norms. 

These issues can arise with managers and leaders too. When a person becomes a manager, they also become an influencer for their team. The bias held by a manager can thus affect the team’s environment, the flow of work, and most importantly – the employees. Biases in a manager can take many forms in the workplace, ranging from unreasonable favoritism to inexplicable discrimination.

All in all, the impact is detrimental to the decision-making process. This is a hurdle on your way to effective decision-making as a manager. Therefore, removing them is essential. In order to do so, you can begin by understanding The Top 10 Most Common Manager Biases. After learning about these biases, you can start working on tackling them to free your decisions from irrationality. 

In totality, we can conclude that you can enhance decision-making through three key steps. It begins with understanding essential abilities to improve the quality, using frameworks and models to add speed, and recognizing biases to add objectivity to your decisions. You can help your team generate unforeseen efficiency on the road to success through these exercises.