You may not think about it on a daily basis, but your life is filled with decisions,
both large and small. You decide when to get up, what to eat, where you work,
who you befriend and who you marry. Unfortunately, when it comes to work, we
often spend a lot of our time avoiding important decisions. There are many reasons
for this, but your lack of decision-making abilities can directly effect your
overall reputation and your chances for success.
Why is it so easy to avoid making decisions? Simply because, by avoiding decisions
we think we are avoiding failure. If we never choose one project over another,
we never have to explain why a project failed. If we never write the book, we
don’t have to explain why it wasn’t better. We risk nothing because
we never make even the simplest decisions. Of course, I am sure you can already
see the fallacy behind the concept. If you fail to make any decisions, you are
risking your entire job at a very fundamental level.
Failing to make decisions can reduce your productivity to nearly zero as you
waffle between one choice and another. You spend so much time thinking about
your decisions that you never get anything done. The term “analysis paralysis” is
often applied in these cases. You continue gathering more and more data, in
hopes of making a decision, but all that data does is make your choice less
clear. Like a dog, you chase your tail around and around without ever catching
it. I see this frequently in technology workers and their corporate departments.
They want to make the “perfect choice”, but the simple fact is,
there is no such thing. We can only make the best choice of a computer, printer
or digital camera in the present. Sure, a newer, better model might come out
tomorrow, but if you are constantly waiting for the “next big thing” you
will find yourself waiting forever.
The biggest danger in avoiding decisions is that your peers and your
boss will eventually start making decisions for you. They will refuse
to have their productivity
stunted by your lack of decisions. Then you will be saddled with decisions you
might otherwise have avoided. In this case, your attempts to avoid a bad decision
will place you in exactly the position you most dreaded. As I mentioned in my
column a few weeks ago, you can either “do” or “have something
done to you.” Failing to make a decision abdicates your role and allows
others to do with you as they wish.
You might not think of it, but your inability to make decisions effects
far more than just you. No matter where you work, there are those
around you who
depend on your decisions. They are waiting on an answer so they can continue
with their own work. Failing to make important decisions leaves them in a bad
position with their management and their peers. If they are constantly telling
their boss that they are waiting on information from you, their boss may come
to think that their worker simply isn’t doing their job. While it may
become clear, after a while, that you are the source of the information bottleneck,
you will have already damaged someone else’s reputation with their manager.
While you might eventually be fired for your inaction, chances are, you will
also be risking the jobs and careers of those around you.
If you want to move your career forward, you need to build a reputation
for decision-making. This doesn’t mean you rush into decisions without considerable
thought, only that you make the best decisions you can, based on the best information
you have today. Sure there will be failures and decisions that don’t work
out as you plan, but this is the very nature of the beast. We often have to
make decisions without having all the information. Waiting for every last bit
of information so you can make the “perfect” decision will mean
that you are waiting for a very long time. Meanwhile, life and business will
pass you by, work will come and go and you will eventually be left at the side
of the business road, wondering what happened to your career.
- END -
Career
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