What Stops You Making Decisions At Work & What To Do About It
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What stops you making decisions at work? The effort needed to make a decision makes your head feel like it might explode. It feels too much, too difficult or too scary. It feels far easier and safer to put off making a decision for another day. Tomorrow, you promise yourself the same thing – it will happen tomorrow.
It might be something simple like what to tell your boss and what to stay quiet about. Or it might be something with much bigger consequences like investing in developing a new product or entering a new market or moving jobs.
What Stops You Making Decisions At Work & What To Do About It
- 7 reasons for not making a decision and what signs to look for
- A brilliant way to approach tough decisions at work
- 3 practical ways to help you make a decision now
The most confident decision making leaders are those that get recruited first and rewarded and recognized the most. Your ability to make decisions impacts every part of your life and particularly your success at work, whatever job you do currently.
In business, the worst decision to make is not making a decision. Focus more on making sure the decisions you do make turn out right rather than making the right decision.
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7 reasons for what stops you making decisions at work and the signs you should look for
Being conscious of what is stopping you from making a decision, in my view, really helps you work out how to overcome decision paralysis. Research suggests we make around 35,000 decisions every single day – over 95% of these decisions are made subconsciously. Every person makes a lot of decisions, so you are the main reason you stop yourself making a decision. We all suffer these challenges:
1 Fear of Failure
Fear of failure stops you making decisions at work. There can be significant personal consequences for failing in many companies such as losing bonuses, not getting promoted and even your job. Having to look colleagues in the eye, see their disappointment, face the social shame … it feels much safer to not make a decision. Being in a psychological safe environment or having a strong track record of success reduces fear of failure.
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2 Lack of Confidence
Lack of confidence stops you making decisions at work. When you don’t feel like you are an expert, or have not made these decisions before or you have got these types of decisions wrong before … it feels much safer to not make a decision. Start small and build up the complexity and impact of your decision making to gain confidence.
3 Lack of Information
Lack of information stops you making decisions, or you are wrestling with lots of conflicting information. Typically, the more information we have, the more confident we feel and the less we fear making the wrong choice. In business, we usually have a lot less information that would like yet a decision is still needed. Be clear on your assumptions and make the best decision you can.
4 The Right Decision
The need to make the right decision stops you making decisions at work. You might be admired as an expert or be a perfectionist and getting things wrong is a major problem for you. At work, decisions are rarely binary or right or wrong. Better or worse is a far more common outcome from decisions. Making a good enough decision rather than a perfect decision, usually gets you the results needed.
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5 Lack of Practice
A lack of practice stops you making decisions. The size of the impact or consequences of the decision on you, your team and company is a big factor. Recognising you have made many good decisions in the past gives you a huge amount of confidence and reduces your fear of failure.
6 What Others Think
Worrying about what others will think stops you making a decision. When you are worried about pleasing others, making decisions while trying to second guess what others want is a very tough ask. Focus on the positive impacts that your decision will make on others rather than the negatives.
7 Lack of Direction
Lack of direction stops you making decisions at work. A key reason leaders must set and communicate direction clearly is to enable their followers to make decisions a lot more easily. Clear direction creates safety, permission and confidence when making decisions. If you don’t have a good sense of the company, department or team direction – understand this first.
Very good and decisive decision makers regularly experience these seven reasons that stop you making decisions. They are human just like you with their own fears, concerns, ambitions and dreams. Their life experiences help and hinder them making different types of decisions in the same way yours do. Good decision makers have worked out techniques to overcome their fears and you can use exactly the same techniques to overcome your fears and make decisions quickly and decisively.
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A brilliant way to approach tough decisions at work
At work, when making decisions, your first priority is making sure that the company is better off because of your decision. When the company is better off, then the team working in the company is better off. When the team is better off, so will you be.
Ask yourself – as a result of taking this option, will the company as a whole be best off compared to the other options available for the decision. If the answer is yes, then make the decision. If the answer is no, then reconsider your other options or create more options.
Another approach to this question is to ask how well does the decision I could take – align with the strategy and goals of the company. Ask the same question for the function and team goals. The closer the alignment, the better the decision in general terms.
Take your personal fears, hopes and dreams out of the equation as much as possible and focus on benefiting the wider company or team when decision making.
3 practical ways to help you make a decision now
When you are struggling to make a decision at work, an incredibly valuable technique to use is reframing. Reframing is a psychological technique to change your perception of the situation. Reframing gets you to look at the situation from a different perspective and gain psychological distance from the decision thus reducing the emotions you feel around making the decision.
Here are 3 practical ways to reframe your situation to better enable you to make a decision quickly and decisively:
1 The Decision Feels Too Big
When the decision feels too big, the consequences too high; when the decision is too complex, break one big decision into lots of little decisions. In your mind, making 10 smaller decisions of the size, complexity and impact that you are used to is much easier and feels a lot more comfortable than making one decision far out of your comfort zone. You achieve the same results by a different route. Break big down into lots of smaller decisions.
2 The Impact Feels Far In The Future
When the impact of the decision feels too far away into the future, when it is easy to put the decision off for another day, change your perception from the present to the future. Think of yourself a week, a month, a year into the future and how you will feel about making the decision and how you feel about the impact of that decision. Bringing your future self back to today creates a different perspective which helps you make the decision today.
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3 Feels Too Hard
When the decision feels too hard, when there are too many powerful emotions associated with the decision, such as the fear, shame and humiliation of making a very public mistake, change your perception to a positively framed decision. Turn risks into opportunities. Turn problems into learning challenges. Change setbacks into a chance for a new direction. Find one or more positive perceptions about the situation your face. It is always more appealing to move forward to gain positives rather than try to avoid negatives.
Mentally reframing your perceptions takes a bit of work, perseverance, and practice. Keep at it and you will find that you automatically look for the best perspective to take to enable you to make a good decision today.
The only thing stopping you making decisions is you. Change how you perceive the situation and you get yourself out of the way of decision making.
In summary
What stops you making decisions at work is you, your fears and your perceptions. Being aware of what is stopping you making decisions at work is a great first step.
Then use the direction of the group or company and what is best for the group or company to make tough decisions. Finally, practice reframing your perceptions for decisions that feel are too big, too far away or too hard to make.
Remember, at work, there are people around you to help you get a different perspective and help make any decision. Make use of them.
If you have any questions on “What stops you making decisions at work & what to do about it” please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
We all make a lot of decisions every single day. At work, when the decisions become bigger, when there are more people relying on us to make good decisions, the pressure, the consequences, the visibility of the decisions we need to make push the decision out of our comfort zone.
It is easy to freeze, to feel that it is too hard, too big a decision to make and stop making it. Use the techniques covered to break down the decision, reframe it and allows yourself to move forward and make a decision.