In these dynamic and accelerated times of change, an essential aspect of effective leadership is the capacity to make sound strategic decisions. After all, leaders will be judged on the decisions they make. A leaders decision-making requires a blend of critical thinking, self-awareness, and ethical framework and the resilience to guide making difficult choices.
Successful leaders recognise adaptive challenges and know they don’t have all the answers. In doing so, they surround themselves with different backgrounds, experiences, and the cognitive skills to help solve complex problems, and they intentionally create a conducive environment to benefit from this diverse thinking.
When we don’t recognise the intentionality needed to make sound decisions we can unconsciously bring so much of ourselves to the process; our biases, beliefs, assumptions, and the people we are surrounded by that influence our perspective. In helping leaders navigate these challenges, leadership development becomes more about human development to strengthen this sometimes flawed process.
If you are looking to evolve as a leader, here are four ways to strengthen your capacity for better decision-making:
What values guide your decision-making?
When you are clear about the values and goals that influence you as a leader, you will better understand how they inform your actions. In doing so, you become more aware of what drives your thinking and emotions and how this influences the decisions you make as a leader. This process begins by exploring the events that have influenced you growing up.
This reflection helps you understand how these experiences have shaped your values and beliefs and how you bring these to decision-making. It also enables you to understand how these events influence the things you are passionate about, including how they might trigger a reaction in certain situations. We can only bring about a greater understanding of ourselves and the human side of leadership by taking on the work to increase our self-awareness.
Self-awareness is ‘second nature’ for introverts because they have a natural inclination for reflection. Through reflection, they better understand their strengths and weaknesses and use this knowledge to address challenges through an ongoing commitment to personal development. So, although leadership selection processes often favour extroverts, introverts are recognised for this capacity in many leadership roles.
What moral reasoning guides your decision-making?
This cognitive process happens when we use internal moral standards to guide our action, rather than being reactive and overly influenced by those around us, particularly in moments of stress or crisis. The ability to self-regulate our emotions and the action we take comes through self-awareness of our values and beliefs and reflecting on the legacy, or future we want to create. Enhancing this capacity through mindfulness and working with an external facilitator like a coach to more consciously inform decisions based on our moral framework and, notably, by committing to take responsibility for your actions.
This capacity for moral reasoning often emerges with age and experience. It is important to highlight this benefit when considering the prejudice often experienced by older applicants in many recruitment processes. A higher level of moral reasoning enables leaders to consider decisions in an ethical framework. Self-awareness and the desire to do what is right also support leaders in making more objective decisions.
What perspectives guide your decision-making?
A leader needs to be able to analyse information objectively and explore other people’s perspectives before they decide. In doing so, they can challenge some of the common biases in decision-making. For example, when we prioritise information that supports a decision that has, for the most part, already been made on an emotional level. In these situations, people only look for data that supports their conclusion. In seeking different perspectives, we must speak to people with different positions and openly consider their viewpoints before acting.
If we examine the gender differences in decision-making, female leaders are more inclined to make decisions by taking the interests of multiple stakeholders into account to arrive at a more balanced and moral judgment. They use collaboration and consensus-building more than men. Women also show a strength relative to men in assimilating and integrating disparate pieces of information, which supports their more objective problem-solving and decision-making. In addition to this strength in decision-making, women tend to develop work relationships more effectively.
What team climate do you create for decision-making?
Success in developing work relationships comes from being more open about your feelings and motives and from finding more genuine ways to connect with people. Sharing both the good and the bad helps build more meaningful relationships. It is about approaching social interactions truthfully to form bonds of unconditional trust. This trust stimulates a more unrestricted exchange of information, creating superior problem-solving among team members.
Importantly, if you take a positive approach to the social exchanges with others, you can create an emotional contagion, which benefits team members. Research suggests that a positive dialogue stimulates higher levels of cognitive functioning and is especially conducive to more creative thinking and problem-solving, while also benefitting overall organisational learning.
As we take a positive approach to the social exchanges among team members, there are sometimes challenges with our unconscious assumptions about people who are different from us. These biases often get in the way of good intentions and keep us from working effectively together. A leader must be aware of these biases and how they may foster feelings of exclusion among team members. Positive social exchanges help people become more tolerant of others and encourage an openness to new ideas.
In summary, recognise the opportunity to take a more intentional approach to strategic decision-making. These four questions challenge the old ‘command and control’ approach in favour of more adaptive leadership — a style that will help navigate situations without an obvious solution, where problem-solving involves changing beliefs, assumptions, and strategies. This leadership approach reinforces the need for different strengths in leadership positions and challenges the stereotypes of an effective leader.