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A novice tends to assume that effective management requires immediate certainty in your choices. However, the skill of decision-making develops when one practices slowing down to consider a decision. Making good decisions is not one ability; it is a cluster of habits. The first is knowing how to distinguish what’s urgent from what’s important. The second is being aware of what you do not yet know. The third is making the decision clearly enough that other people will understand why it was made. If your management decisions today feel messy or hasty, that doesn’t mean you can’t make decisions, which usually means you don’t yet have a better way to practice making them.
Begin by designing a basic practice exercise for yourself out of the situations at work that you encounter most often. Select just one decision that you made recently, even a small one like rescheduling a meeting, correcting a minor mistake, or choosing which tasks to prioritize. Write a short two-or-three-sentence description of the situation, and then restate it under three short questions that summarize the core decision (what is the immediate action required?, what can wait?, and what should the desired outcome be?). By writing the decision questions this way, you’ll change your brain’s automatic approach to urgency; instead of reacting to the loudest element of urgency, you’ll be identifying the essence of the decision that needs to be made. Write a final sentence about what action you would recommend, and why. Try not to think too hard about making a perfect decision; the aim is to make your reasoning legible. Once you can see the reasoning, you’ll be more able to improve it.
The first problem is that many people treat all decisions as if they were equally important; this causes hasty decisions, undefined priorities, and unnecessary stress. Being late in answering a low-level question feels as stressful as a big team problem when all problems are treated the same way. The second problem is that people collect too much information because they’re anxious about making a decision. Novices assume that more data will reduce uncertainty; they often fail to realize that at some point more data is a way to avoid deciding.
You can do a 15-minute practice session in a way that adds only a minimal weight to your day. Use the first five minutes to revisit a recent decision and identify the stress around it. The next five minutes should focus on rewriting the situation in the first few sentences you used. The last five minutes involve deciding which of two alternative actions you’d choose and why. If possible, review what actually happened against your decision afterward. This is where you can improve on the decision, since even a wrong decision can be valuable in practice. If you do this kind of practice regularly, your management abilities will become more steady, because practice replaces waiting for a crisis.
When you’re feeling blocked, don’t try to force yourself to feel more certain; instead, scale down the decision and define your terms. It’s difficult to decide if your question is vague, like “What am I going to do here?” It’s more useful to be specific, like “What must I decide first?” or “What should be clear to me before I answer?” You can ask for advice in a way that improves decision-making, not in a way that just seeks validation. Share the decision, the reasoning, and the hardest trade-off; that will yield more useful advice. You will begin to notice that you have some habits that affect decision-making. For example, you might find that you struggle with making clear decisions when personal relationships are a concern; perhaps you rush decisions if there’s a hard deadline on them. Those aren’t errors you need to hide; those are the things you need to practice managing better.
To improve decision-making you need practice and correction. The objective isn’t to become someone who never feels unsure; the objective is to become a person who can slow things down just enough to see them clearly, act on purpose, and learn from it afterward. New managers sometimes assume that they should feel confident first and decision-making abilities will come later. Confidence comes after you establish a practice. If you can continue to think about real decisions in real time, scale them properly, and rehearse a few minutes at a time, eventually you’ll be able to decide better, too. You’ll start to view your decisions as more readable; decisions that seemed like a drag on your energy will become part of the craft.