Decision-Making Skills Every Team Member Should Have
Each of us has to get lost in endless meetings from time to time. And, mostly, we leave the sessions with few remarkable outcomes! However, things get easier when you know how to make up your mind on a certain issue. To be this lucky all the time, you need to have some main decision-making skills for your own good and for your company’s sake since those skills can make a huge difference when it comes to improvement. If you are running towards a goal, you need to carry some leadership traits: the core decision-making ability. Fortunately, this is something upgradable. Let’s take a closer look at the required skillsets for every team member, and then dive into the next subject about how to improve our decision-making skills.
What Are the Core Decision-Making Skills?
You need to have a wide variety of abilities to make the right decision fast. If you constantly ask yourself, “What are decision-making skills?”, you will get the answer in this part. Here are the main examples of good decision-making skills:
- Creativity: To generate a satisfying solution, creativity harnessed with logic and emotion will be necessary. Logic lets you keep your sanity alive while emotion holds the humanity with your decisions anytime. Consider weekly brainstorming meetings to boost your team’s creativity and try to feed on different perspectives from diverse expertise areas. Beneficial slack time that you interact as a team is needed to learn from each other and boost creativity.
- Intuition: When the topic is about decision-making, intuition is something we cannot ignore. Hence, intuition is about deciding and trusting one’s instincts. As the instincts root from experiences, the lessons learned will be a factor in your decision-making. OK to be optimistic, but, remember your past learnings and consider them in order not to repeat the same mistakes.
- Emotional Intelligence: Being smart and able to make good decisions is not only related to IQ, which is the intelligence quotient. Emotional intelligence matters much when it comes to showing decision-making skills. Your emotions should provide a basis for your inspiration about a mission that keeps you focused. Ask yourself and your team about how do you feel about the decision you made.
- Time management: This bullet is maybe the most important one of all. Since decisions that made quickly can help your organization to perform better, you need to be able to prioritize your activities according to their importance and impact. Schedule your activities so that you have spent enough time to collect some data for the decision in progress, and so that you spend enough time with your team to discuss about the decision.
- Teamwork: A team is made up of multiple individuals for sure. Collaboration is a must in every team. Sound decisions generally emerge from teams’ brainstorming sessions and as a result of high level of interaction inside the team . That’s why working as a team in decision-making situations help the results be more effective and beneficial. Use the collective wisdom of your team!
- Reasoning: Reasoning is one of the main skills needed to be informed about the decision you make. Make sure that you weigh the pros and cons of the decisions that you’re considering. Try to start with “why you need to make that decision”, and “what can be the coincidences of that decision”. This is the best way to stay safe for now and plan for the future.
- Problem-solving: Every company experiences hard times and has to go through critical decision-making processes. That’s why it will be perfectly useful that every team member has problem-solving skills to make game-changer decisions in order to overcome obstacles in a proper way. Problem-solving skills help you explore the source of the issue and find an effective solution accordingly. Team members can develop their problem-solving skills by listening others actively, communicating with as many different people as possible, researching and analyzing more. Acquiring more technical information, role playing and observing others’ problem solving ways can also let you boost your problem-solving skills.
How to Improve Decision-Making Skills
Effective decision-making is essential in any workplace. Whether you are a specialist or a leader, you better be well-equipped with good decision-making skills. Every member of the team has to decide regarding a certain subject throughout the workday. And the decisions they make, contribute somehow to the company at the end of the day. At this point, the importance of decision-making skills is more noticeable. Let’s see how to improve decision-making skills in several bullets.
Setting Priorities Helps
Being tidy is always a good idea. This is also valid when you have a decision to make. Be clear about your team’s objectives and use your time smart enough to act on activities that will lead you towards your objectives. By the way, examining the resources that may help you through the way will be more than welcome.
Confidence Is a Must
Seeming confident is a two-way ticket. It contributes to every individual in the team and does the same to the team as a whole. When everyone trusts in themselves and their decisions, the team will be stronger. Try to advise each other on the advantages and disadvantages of each decision alternatives and do not forget to encourage one another for fast results. This can also raise productivity in the group and make everyone be on the same page.
Leave Down and Consult a Superior
Before having second thoughts, getting a different opinion is beneficial. This action can also give you courage and extra confidence in your decision-making abilities. This superior mind can be a best friend, an experienced colleague, or a professional expert. Show your plan, give examples, identify deadlines and company objectives and learn what they think. Then try to meet them somewhere logical if you need to.
Deadlines Are Your Limits
This is required in many fields of life. While you exercise, study, sleep, meditate, shop, or do something else, setting a deadline helps you catch up. Likewise, when you are on the edge of deciding something important, set a timebox for yourself and try to respect it. In this way, you can manage perfectionist approaches and get faster with good enough decisions.
Determine Alternative Decisions & Get Feedback
To come up with an alternative is mostly a good idea. But the more choices you have, the harder it gets to decide. That’s why it is a good idea to test your alternatives on a small group of people and get their feedback as early as possible. For example, let’s say that you are responsible for the social media account of your company, and you need to choose a photo for one of the platforms. Focus on the ones that tell your company’s story the best, pick few alternatives and then go and ask for feedback from your teammates. You will be surprised how easily feedbacks will help you complete your mission.
See the Before-Tried-Ones
You can apply this when you are unsure about the result of your decision. Do a quick research and see what your competitors have done in similar situations. Exploring their plans and actions for the same occasions can light a bulb and help you make an effective decision ASAP.
Remember to Take a Breath
Especially if you are about to make important decisions that affect your company’s reputation or existence, it is useful to take a break. Enjoy an open-air walk, read a book, or just close your eyes and ease your mind for a second! These all will help you refocus and make impressive decisions at the end of the day.
Practice Makes Perfect
If you want to decide more quickly and effectively, you have to train your brain. Begin with the small ones. For example, try deciding on the color of one column in your PowerPoint presentation. Once you persuade yourself to think that you are confident, you may pass on a higher level. You will improve your decision-making skills step by step.
Taking this article as a guide, you need to work on improving your decision-making skills and contributing to your team. You can also try to use some special tools to help you make faster and better decisions in an entertaining way. Remember that important decisions make a big impact on both corporate and individual levels! Try to improve your decision-making skills as much as you can and be the one for your team!
