Good workplace decision-making means gathering relevant information, weighing your options, recognizing biases, considering risks, and choosing the action most likely to achieve your goals. These 10 practical decision-making tips will help managers and employees make more confident, informed workplace decisions.
We make decisions every day, both at work and in our personal lives. Some are straightforward with few consequences, while others can have a significant impact on projects, teams, budgets, or careers. The more important the decision, the more valuable a structured decision-making approach becomes.
Quick summary
- Define the goal first
- Gather relevant information
- Consider several options
- Check for bias
- Evaluate risks
- Review your decision afterwards
For example, it is usually easy to decide what to have for breakfast, or, in the workplace, it is normally relatively easy for a manager to decide whether to approve a team member’s time off.
However, some workplace decisions are far more complex and strategic. Deciding whether to launch a new product, restructure a team, or invest in new technology can have significant consequences if you get it wrong.
It is for these harder-to-make decisions that our tips for good decision-making can be useful.
What Is Good Decision-Making?
Making effective decisions involves many skills and strategies. However, we can say, in a nutshell, that:
Good decision-making is a deliberate and thoughtful process, which leads to achieving desired goals while producing the best possible outcomes for everyone involved.
In this article, we will explore some tips for making good decisions, whether you are a manager, an employee, or a team member at work. In addition, these tips might also be helpful for you to apply in other areas of your life.
Why Is Effective Decision-Making Important at Work?
Making good and effective decisions is extremely important in every aspect of life. In the workplace, some of its benefits include the following outcomes:
- Efficiency – Making the right decisions can save time and resources.
- Productivity – The decisions that you make can have a great impact on your outputs.
- Customer satisfaction – Choosing the right strategy in customer care can make a world of difference to how happy your customers are.
- Risk management – Evaluating risk is part of the decision-making process. You can’t avoid risks completely, but if you follow a good decision-making process, this can help you minimize them.
- Employee engagement – In particular, this refers to the fact that a good decision-making process tends to involve employees to some extent. Consequently, employees who are involved in decision-making are likely to feel more appreciated and happier with the results.
- Identifying and creating opportunities – If you can make the right decisions fast and at the right time, you will be able to not only grab opportunities but also foresee opportunities and even create new ones based on your assessment of the environment.
10 Top Tips for Decision-Making at Work
Having discussed what good decision-making is and why it is important in the workplace, let’s now look at some tips for better decision-making in the workplace that you can apply.
1. Define Your Goals
This is the first of the tips for decision-making, because it is the first and most fundamental step in how to make better decisions.
If you do not know what your goals are, you are unlikely to make the right decision because you won’t know in which direction you want to go. As a result, your decisions might be driven by chance rather than by a thoughtful decision-making process.
So, what you want to do first is identify the issue (it may be a problem that needs solving or a question that needs answering) and then ask yourself, “What do I want to achieve exactly?”
After you have set your goals, you are able to start deciding what to do to achieve them.
2. Evaluate Different Approaches
Quite often, we can get into habits for how to do things. This can also happen when we try to make decisions, in particular as we get comfortable with a certain process, and when we want to save time.
For some routine decisions, this is fine. However, for more strategic issues, you might need to consider different approaches so you don’t get stuck in the same thought process and miss potential opportunities.
There are many ways to include different approaches when you try to make a decision; for example, you can:
- Get input from other people, even outsiders or people who are not familiar with the issue, and can see the problem from a different perspective that you might not consider otherwise.
- Involve your team by asking them questions (and listening carefully to their answers) or using techniques such as brainstorming.
- Use some creative decision-making techniques, such as mind-mapping, six thinking hats, or a change of perspective.
- Ask for feedback from those who will be affected by your decision to gain an understanding of different points of view on the issue.
3. Implement Time Limits and Prioritize
While you want to take your time making decisions and not rush, you also want to set a time limit to avoid decision-making fatigue.
So, when you are making decisions, try to set a realistic timeframe, and you can do so depending on what kind of decision you are making.
Your timeframe will depend on factors such as:
- When you want to achieve your goals by
- the demands from other people involved in the decision (or who will feel its impact)
- the business environment (such as how fast your competitors are moving)
- and the complexity of the topic and more.
Prioritizing is something that can also help you decide on your timeframes.
So, consider which goals are the most important and/or urgent to achieve and which tasks you need to do first. Then, decide what to do next.
4. Check Alternative Options
The next one of our tips for decision-making refers to your ability to keep an eye open for a variety of options.
Too often, when we are making decisions, we settle for the most obvious choice, or the one that is the easiest or quickest to implement, rather than what is best.
Sometimes, we have to do so because we lack time and resources. If you can, though, try to keep your mind open and evaluate as many feasible options as you can.
To help you check alternative options against each other, you can use decision-making techniques such as a decision matrix.
5. Check Your Biases
When considering tips for making good decisions, one of the most important ones is about trying to avoid biases, which are thinking shortcuts that we all have.
Having a bias means thinking that a person, thing, or idea is good or bad based on a preconception, without checking the facts about the specific situation we are faced with.
Many biases can affect the way we make decisions, including confirmation bias, escalating commitment, false analogy, and other biases that you can read more about in our post about types of decision-making biases.
As you want to avoid making assumptions in order to make good decisions, being aware of your biases is vital.
6. Mitigate Cons
Every option we choose when we make a decision is bound to have both pros and cons. So, when you make decisions, try to maximize the pros and mitigate the cons. How do you do that?
There are techniques you can use and various approaches you can adopt to limit the cons of the option you choose.
For example, you can brainstorm ideas with your team, you can have a plan B in place, you can engage your stakeholders by asking them questions, or you can run a test or a pilot project when possible.
Just make sure to think of as many cons as possible for every option. This is not to stop you from making decisions, but rather so that you are prepared and can more easily overcome possible future obstacles.
7. Collect Information
Collecting information is one of the most important tips for decision-making, as you will not be able to make an informed decision without knowing the facts.
When searching for information, though, make sure that it is relevant information, so you don’t get distracted, and, to help you stay on track, refer to your goals. Does the information contribute towards understanding how to achieve your goals? If you answer yes, then that will be the right type of information to seek.
There are many ways to seek information (relying either on quantitative or qualitative research methods), such as interviews, surveys, asking questions to your team, direct observations, gathering numbers and figures, etc.
8. Embrace Uncertainty
This decision-making tip refers to being flexible and adaptable. When you make decisions, you need to accept that you will never be 100% certain of what is going to happen. You need to remember this so you don’t get decision paralysis and don’t stress too much.
To help you deal with uncertainty, you can, as we discussed earlier, try to mitigate cons by having alternative plans in place and coming up with alternative ideas on what to do in case things don’t go well.
9. Involve the Right People
When you make decisions as a manager, you will often need to involve other people, particularly if it is a very strategic or complex decision that affects many people.
However, you need to involve the right people. Some things to consider concerning the type of people you want to involve are:
- Avoid (or carefully consider if you need to include) people who may have a conflict of interest, as they may try to steer the decision towards a solution that is best for them, rather than for all those involved.
- You may not be able to include all the people affected by the decision, as doing so might make it too hard to reach a decision, but you can at least gather some input from them, such as via a consultation.
- Include your team members, or at least those who are the most qualified to help you make that decision.
- You may want to include some experts on the topic at hand.
- Involve third parties who have no interest in the matter and also, who may not be familiar with it, so they can bring a fresh perspective. These can include paid consultants or people from different departments or organizations.
10. Avoid Groupthink
Groupthink happens when a group of people agrees on something not because they genuinely think that it is the best option, but because they want to agree with the majority.
This can happen for a variety of reasons, such as when people lack confidence, if they are afraid to speak up, if they lack engagement and don’t care about the outcome, or if the leader is too authoritarian.
Groupthink damages good decision-making as it stops people from having innovative ideas and from dissenting even if they see problems with the option being chosen.
As a manager, you can avoid groupthink by listening to your team members, encouraging them to voice their opinions, and making them feel safe in doing so.
Looking for more workplace critical thinking resources? Visit our complete Critical Thinking Skills Guides.
FAQs
What is effective decision-making?
Effective decision-making is when you use a structured process to gather all of the relevant information, carefully evaluate it and the options, and then consider any risks and biases that might be present. Then you choose the best course of action based on the goals. At work, good decision-making directly impacts productivity and employee engagement.
Why is decision-making important at work?
Decision-making is important at work because it can directly impact workplace productivity, sales, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement. When good decisions are made, you get to solve problems effectively and reduce problems that otherwise might build.
How can managers make better decisions?
Managers can improve decision-making by setting clear goals, gathering facts, involving the right people, being open to alternative solutions, recognizing cognitive biases, factoring in risks, and reviewing the results of important decisions to identify lessons for the future.
Moving Forward with Tips for Decision-Making
Whether you are a manager or an employee who wants to learn how to make decisions in the most effective way, I hope you found these tips for decision-making helpful.
Having good decision-making skills is very important, whatever your career path, and remember that, like every skill, decision-making can be improved with time and practice.
Teaching decision-making? Explore our editable Decision-Making Teaching Materials
