There’s something that is slowly eating away at the very fabric of your business.
Do you know what it is?
One word.
Indecision
Indecision is quite possibly one of the most destructive forces affecting businesses today.
Let’s be clear here – what do we mean by indecision? Well, we’re talking about the lack of or inability to make a decision.
There are some scenarios around indecision that you, as a strong business leader, need to be very wary of, and here are three of the worst offenders:
#1 Avoiding a bad decision
This is the worst of the lot. It’s also the most common of all because it’s human nature. For some reason we think not making a decision is better than making a bad one. We’re just fooling ourselves though. I’m not talking about where you allow time to pass before acting on a decision. That’s different. This is where no decision is made at all.
Let’s simplify it to see how ridiculous it really is. Think about getting dressed this morning. What if you couldn’t decide which pair of pants or which dress you wanted to wear. Would you simply not make the decision and go without? I didn’t think so. Not making a decision would have far worse consequences in this case than making a bad decision.
Now look at the other extreme – think of a fighter pilot caught in a dogfight, hit by enemy fire and needing to find a way out of the jet as a matter of life and death. They would need to eject their seat at the right time to avoid enemy fire and other dangers from the environment around them, so it wouldn’t be easy to make the right decision. But would it be better to make no decision at all and not eject? Highly unlikely.
Although these are extremes, the reality is that a decision, even a bad one, allows you to take control of the situation, to firmly understand how you want to proceed, and then to be able to alter course from there.
When you’re indecisive, there’s a strong feeling of not having control over the situation, waiting for other factors to play out. When you’re the victim, you can’t win.
#2 The elephant in the room
In this case, the lack of a decision is obvious but no one wants to address it. Situations like this are very dangerous because not only does the indecision cause problems, but everyone loses faith in the leadership team because it’s so painfully clear that a decision needs to be made.
Everyone else will think that they know the answer. It doesn’t matter if they do know the answer or not, because as mentioned in #1 above, a bad decision is better than no decision anyway.
The bottom line here is that if there’s an elephant in the room, best address it immediately before it sits on you.
#3 Uncertainty about your purpose
Good companies know that to make progress, you need to be able to make decisions that are aligned to where you want to be. But sometimes businesses want to be too many things to too many people, and don’t have a clear enough picture of where they want to be to be able to to make a good decision.
You will never be indecisive if you know your purpose
Lou Holtz
When this happens, there’s a type of paralysis that sets in and makes it impossible to see whether a decision will be good or bad. Being unable to tell the difference simply means most won’t want to, and the default becomes to rather just see what happens and not make a decision.
The reality here though is that even if you make a decision, it’ll be difficult to tell if it is a good or bad one because you can’t tell if it’s helping you achieve what you want when you don’t know what you want.
Right, now you’re probably asking “What you can I do about this?”
How can I avoid indecision?
How do I…
…take back control
If you want your business to succeed, you need to find a way make intentional decisions rather than allowing the future to unfold by default.
The best way to do that is to be certain of what you need to make the best decisions you can. Once you know what to look out for, when those big decisions come calling, you’ll know what to look out for and know when to back yourself and your team.
We’re putting the finishing touches on an e-Book called
“Three ingredients for better decision making”
This e-Book is designed to help you better understand whether you’ve set yourself up with what you need for making good decisions. If you want to receive a complimentary copy of the e-Book when it’s released then sign up here.
If you can’t wait that long, you’re welcome to contact us about our strategies and tools that you can use right now to start helping your business make better decisions.