9 Powerful Questions to Ask Yourself When Making Decisions At Work
A lot of decisions you make at work are easy. Some stretch you. Others are really difficult. Making the best decision you can at work is a lot easier and quicker when you ask 9 powerful questions in a sequence. These questions create the backbone to make better decisions a lot faster at work. The questions work with the easy decisions all the way through to the really tough decisions. Ask yourself these powerful questions OR ask the questions to those asking you to make a decision.
9 Powerful Questions to Ask Yourself When Making Decisions At Work
- 4 Essential Questions To Ask When Making Any Decision
- 5 Very Valuable Questions To Ask When Making Difficult, Complex or High Impact Decisions
- Summary
Good decision making is a highly prized skill in any organisation. Decisions create impacts. Decisions are the line between success and failure – for individuals, teams and businesses. This adds a lot of pressure to become good at making decisions OR not to make decisions if you don’t feel confident in making a good decision.
Wherever you are in your career right now, you have decision making skills. We all make a ton of decisions every single day. When the decisions become more complex, with larger impacts, or with only bad choices available, the decisions themselves become much harder to make.
The really good decisions makers have a system or framework that they go through for every decision they make. A framework and their experience in using it makes them really good decisions makers. The 9 powerful questions to ask yourself when making decisions provides you a framework. Go through the questions in order and you cover all the main angles to make really good decisions in the circumstances you face.
The last question is often missed by managers making decisions and far too often missing this creates a lot more problems and can be pretty embarrassing.
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What is the Timeframe? – the first question to ask when making decisions at work
Always ask this question first because the timeframe determines what you can and can’t do before making a decision. For example, there is a lot you can find out in a day. There is not much you can do in five minutes.
Very few decisions are needed immediately in my experience. When you dig into the reasons behind a person asking for quick decisions, you usually have more time than they are trying to give you. The bigger the impact of the decision, the more time you should demand before making it.
Always be clear about what the real timeframes are to make the decision.
what specifically is the desired outcome? – The second question to ask yourself when making decisions at work
What are you or the other person trying to achieve? The more specific and clear your answer is to this question, the easier and quicker you will find it to make a decision. When your goals or outcomes are vague, fuzzy and unclear, making a decision becomes harder and slower. It is also a lot harder to make a good decision. Invest the time to really understand what outcome is needed, why it is needed and how aligned it is to team and company goals.
What is the Context of the decision – The third question to ask yourself when making decisions
The background or context for decision making is surprisingly important. Different contexts literally will change the decision you make.
Imagine if you were asked to approve the hiring of an additional member of staff. If the business was trying to save costs and struggling to grow, you would probably say no. If the business was growing strongly and short of staff, you would say yes. At worst you might question if this was the right person to hire. The context will impact the decision you make.
Keep asking questions or seeking answers until you understand the background and context of the decision before making it.
what is the impact of this decision and who is impacted? – The fourth question to ask yourself
There are lots of different ways you might consider the impact of decisions. Some examples:
- The impact on financial profit
- Impact on the cash balance of the company
- The feelings of individuals
- How the culture of the team might be impacted
- How clients or customers might respond
The financial impact of your decision is nearly always relevant at work. The financial impact of decisions often guides who and how many people are involved in the decision making process.
Prioritise the different types of impact and whether short term or longer term impacts are more important.
Getting good answers to each of these four questions is essential to improve the quality of any decision you make.
The next 5 questions are very useful to improve how well you make the more complex and higher impact decisions
What data and insights are available? – The fifth question to ask yourself
Using performance data – whether financial, operational or sales related – is incredibly useful to guide your decision making.
Analysis and numbers help quantify the impact of each options you could choose. For example if your company wanted to be more profitable, using financial information to choose the option with the highest profit would make the decision making a lot quicker and easier.
Using data deepens your understanding of the impact of options available. Data is also useful to check what you are being told is accurate and unbiased, if others are asking you to make a decision.
Seek out useful and relevant data to the decision you need to make.
Do I really understand the pros and cons of each option available? – The sixth question to ask yourself when making decisions at work
The better and more deeply you understand the options you are choosing between and how your decision will create impacts, the better your decision making will be.
When comparing options, go through
- the impacts,
- the critical steps,
- how easy it will be to implement the decision,
- the up-front investment needed
- the resources to implement
- any other sensible element for your specific decision
When you understand all the pros and cons of each option, making the choice between options is easier and quicker. Invest time to understand the pros and cons of your decision.
What am I communicating to team and colleagues by making this decision? – The seventh question
This question is really important for leaders of teams. Every decision you make is a communication to your team. Each decision will impact the expectations you set, their trust in you, their motivation, the team culture and ultimately team performance.
Align what your decisions communicate with what you ask from them, and you will have a happy productive team. If your decisions conflict with what you ask from your team, you will have a confused, uncertain team which will not perform as well.
For example – a fellow leader publicly gave one of his team members a company prize. Two weeks later, the same leader sacked that person for dishonesty. This complete U-turn left his team confused, shocked and scared about being fired next.
Always think through what your decisions are communicating to those you lead.
How aligned is my preferred decision with my values? – The eighth question to ask yourself when making decisions at work
Our values influence the decisions we make. When we make decisions that align with our values, we feel good. When in conflict we feel uneasy, unhappy etc. Our values rarely change quickly. To make consistent decisions, align your decisions to your values.
Your company’s values are another set of reference points you should use to make consistent decisions that serve the best interests of the company. Again, company values should not change quickly.
Do we have the capability, support and resources to practically implement this decision? – The ninth question to ask yourself when making decisions
In my view, making the decision is often the easy part. Implementing the decision is the hard part. Ask any company board about which was easier – deciding on the strategy or making their strategy happen throughout the business.
To make good decisions which you can implement, be realistic about the capability within your team or business to implement the decision. i.e. what skills and bandwidth are needed and do we have them. Think about the support you will need to gather to implement the decision. When decisions are aligned with company goals, getting support is a lot easier. Finally, think through the resources you are going to need to implement the decision.
Realistically considering the implementation challenges often changes the option chosen during the decision making process. Always think through the capability and resources available.
in summary
Using a tried and tested framework will improve how well you make decisions, how quickly you make decisions and how consistently you make good decisions. I strongly recommend you use a framework for making decisions.
Our framework uses these nine powerful questions to ask yourself when making decisions at work:
- What is the timeframe?
- what specifically is the desired outcome?
- What is the Context of the decision
- what is the impact of this decision and who is impacted?
- What data and insights are available?
- Do I really understand the pros and cons of each option available?
- What am I communicating to team and colleagues by making this decision?
- How aligned is my preferred decision with my values?
- Do we have the capability, support and resources to practically implement this decision?
If you have any questions about “9 Powerful Questions to Ask Yourself When Making Decisions At Work”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
Take a look at all the additional resources we have available to help you and your team make better decisions in less time.
