Reflecting on your decision-making process may be more important than the choice you make

Let me be clear: making the wrong decision is not a problem. How you react and deal with that result is what makes you a leader. True leaders can look back on their decisions and objectively evaluate the process that led to their choice. Bad leaders get caught up in the ‘what ifs’ and struggle with future decisions.”

Doug Phares, managing director, Silverwind Enterprises

“You blew it! Again!”

You’ve been here before. You’re out to eat at a restaurant, and you’re split between two choices. Maybe your friend or partner orders one of the options you were considering, so you pick the other. But one bite in and you’re completely sure that their steak is vastly superior to the pasta you’re chewing.

You both had the same information, but looking back on it, you don’t like where your choice led you. This happens all the time — everybody makes choices every day, but for a manager, that is literally the job description. Yet time and again, I see managers who don’t like the outcome of a choice and automatically conclude that there was a flaw in their decision making.

I challenge you to rethink this process. First and foremost, leadership is nothing more and nothing less than the capacity to make a well-reasoned decision using limited information. Without that, an organization is rudderless, unfocused and missing opportunities while it swats blindly at threats.

Being a leader means gathering as much information as you reasonably can, assessing and evaluating it to land on the best choice, then enacting that decision. Being a leader also means making decisions that don’t turn out well. Life is not a math equation with clearly defined variables — you’re always working off imperfect data, which will, perhaps not infrequently, lead to imperfect choices and imperfect results.

To go back to the restaurant example, you could have carefully studied the menu and even taken a look around the room to suss out how the options looked on the plate. Even doing all that, you can still end up with a less-than-stellar dish. That doesn’t make it your fault — the chef could have had an off day; there may be a problem with a certain ingredient, or maybe your plate was just left under a heat lamp too long.

You can collect all the data that you want, but at some point, you have to pull the trigger and make a decision. When you do, it’s important that you’re comfortable finding out later that you could have chosen better. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look critically at your choices, but it does mean that you’ll be better served by examining your process rather than the outcome.

In these reflections, you may find you misunderstood information or failed to collect and analyze a crucial data point. If so, then you have learned an important lesson for the future. But if you find that you made the best decision you could with the information available, then there’s nothing for you to change, even if it led to a bad result.

Let me be clear: making the wrong decision is not a problem. How you react and deal with that result is what makes you a leader. True leaders can look back on their decisions and objectively evaluate the process that led to their choice. Bad leaders get caught up in the “what ifs” and struggle with future decisions.

It’s important to create a culture of reviewing decisions, not outcomes. Challenging your decision process is healthy and a sign of a growing organization. Do your homework, and make the best decision you can. The outcome may not be what you wanted, but that isn’t always within your control. Be a leader and center your attention on what is firmly within your grasp: the process.

Doug Phares is the former CEO of the Sandusky News Group. He currently serves as managing director of Silverwind Enterprises, which owns and provides management services to small businesses. He can be reached at doug@silverwind.biz.