Making hard decisions

• You might be dissatisfied with your decision making for any number of reasons. Think about these reasons to ensure that you are not blaming yourself unnecessarily. Often our confidence is undermined because we think that we are the only ones with a particular problem, when, in fact, many of our colleagues feel the same way.
• Perfectionists will never be happy with the quality of their decisions. Their challenge is how to develop more realistic expectations of themselves, not worry about improving their decision making skills.
• Complexity and rapid change make it extremely hard for anyone to have a very high success rate in their decisions.
• It is better to decide something than wait so long that you miss the boat. Even if you make the wrong decision half the time, you will be right more often than those who wait for the perfect solution.
• We like to think we make rational decisions - based on an objective weighing of all the relevant factors pro and con. In reality, many managers rely on gut instinct, shooting from the hip and rationalizing their decisions after the fact.
• Skilled managers are often also good politicians - they make public their successful decisions while hiding their failures. This leads others to lose confidence, feeling that they could never achieve such an impressive success rate in their decisions.
• We are generally more regularly reminded of our failures than rewarded for our successes. This has the effect of undermining the confidence of otherwise generally good decision makers - surely a paralyzing outcome.
• Does your culture make it hard to take risks by punishing mistakes. How can you show some leadership to help change this restrictive culture?