As a manager or executive, how many decisions would you guess that you make each year?
Three thousand? Three hundred thousand?
Try 3 billion.
And the stakes are high when it comes to getting all of those billions of decisions right. Researchers have found a 95% correlation between effective decision-making and financial performance.
Sadly, they've also found that 98% of leaders fail to apply best practices when making decisions.
With all of the recent upheaval in the way we work, you and your colleagues may have been forced out of your comfort zones when it comes to how you make decisions. But I believe that can be a good thing. Here's how to turn those on-the-fly changes into lasting improvements in decision-making.
What Has Worked For You During This Crisis?
The past few months have turned up the intensity on decision-making at work. Your team may be trying to get the same amount of work (or maybe even more) done with fewer people. At the same time, you may be discarding existing plans to react to and get ahead of rapidly changing events.
Those are big challenges. But I'm seeing lots of organizations really rising to those challenges by streamlining, expediting and improving their decision-making processes.
Such changes have been spurred by the extraordinary circumstances we're all working under. But you may want to keep some of them even after your team or organization moves out of crisis mode.
Improving the way you make decisions can have a big impact on the bottom line. Excess bureaucracy costs the U.S. economy more than $3 trillion a year. Slow decision-making hampers innovation, productivity, resilience and growth.
So I want to encourage you to check in with yourself and with your team to see what you've learned about your decision-making process this year. What have you done differently? What has worked well? What do you want to keep doing?
You might have answers like these:
"We don't need as much information as we thought we did to make effective decisions. So we can save time on information gathering."
"It's working well for us to have fewer people weigh in on decisions. Decision quality hasn't suffered, everyone still feels engaged, and we're reaching decisions faster."
"We've all gotten better at building a consensus, which is also speeding up our work."
"We've seen how clear communication expedites decision-making, and we now have some communication best practices to use as we make decisions in the future."
"We used to let roadblocks slow down our decision-making, but now we know more about how to remove them or work around them."
As with many other things, making better decisions comes down to noticing what works so you can keep doing it — and do it more often. Carve out a few minutes today to reflect about your own decision-making. For more strategies on effective leadership, even during difficult times, pick up a copy of my book "Show Up. Step Up. Step Out."