NOW! Fail or Thrive Excerpts for Busy Leaders by Ronald D. Sears - HTML preview

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How You Handle Bad Decisions Defines You

“Own your mistakes and you’ll own your achievements.”

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Key Points

5 Steps for Recovering from a Bad Decision--unknown

1. Take full responsibility. The first step you must take when having made a poor choice is recognize the part you played in a situation.

2. Understand your choices. It's essential that you understand why you made the decision you made. Keep in mind that this is not a time to think of excuses for why it happened; this is a time to understand why it happened so you can avoid making similar decisions in the future.

3. Apologize and explain. If your decision hurt anyone else, the best thing you can do is apologize and explain. Don't offer excuses or try to play down the situation in any way.

4. Focus on the present. When you've made a bad decision, it can be tempting to dwell on that but, that's a waste of time.

5. Be proactive in the future. The best thing you can do for yourself when you find that you've knowingly made a bad decision is to find ways to be proactive after the fact. Ask yourself what can be fixed or changed now.

By Jamie Friedlander

1. Accept your emotions. Suppressing your emotions will get you nowhere.

2. Then, focus on the cold, hard facts. Once you’ve recognized and accepted the emotions you have following a poor decision, Dr. Benjamin Ritter, Ed.D., founder of LFY Consulting, says one of the best things you can do is focus on the facts.

3. Don’t let the bad decision consume you. Tristan Gutner, a life and business coach says it’s important to mentally separate yourself from the decision. Doing so can help you strip it of its power. “Once we’ve made what we’d call a bad decision, we give it a lot of meaning it does not inherently have,”

4. Forgive yourself. Don’t be too hard on yourself in the wake of a poor decision. Use the failure of your bad decision as leverage for future success.

5. Accept your regret. After making a bad judgment call, your mind will likely be flooded with regret. This regret, it turns out, can actually be a powerful tool. Accept your regret and move forward.

6. If your regret is all-consuming, try practicing gratitude. We all have regrets. “Things we wish we did differently or didn’t say. But those regrets don’t have to control you. You have to learn to control your thoughts to see the positives instead of the negatives.”

7. Create a decision-making process for the future. The next time you’re confronted with a big decision, you might feel anxious or stressed that you’ll make another mistake. To counteract this anxiety, consider putting a decision-making process into place for all future calls.

Three Reasons Why You Make Bad Decisions By Kendra Cherry

1. Mental Shortcuts Can Trip You Up. In order to make decisions quickly and economically, our brains rely on a number of cognitive shortcuts known as heuristics. These mental rules-of-thumb allow us to make judgments quite quickly and often times quite accurately, but they can also lead to fuzzy thinking and poor decisions.

2. You Often Make Poor Comparisons. When making decisions, we often make rapid comparisons without really thinking about our options. In order to avoid bad decisions, relying on logic and thoughtful examination of the options can sometimes be more important than relying on your immediate "gut reaction."

3. You Can Be Too Optimistic. Surprisingly, people tend to have a natural-born optimism that can hamper good decision-making. When they discover that the risk of something bad happening is actually much higher than they estimated, they tend to simply ignore the new information.

9 Habits That Lead to Terrible Decisions by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman

1. Laziness. This showed up as a failure to check facts, to take the initiative, to confirm assumptions, or to gather additional input.

2. Not anticipating unexpected events. Many people just get so excited about a decision they are making that they never take the time to do that simple due-diligence.

3. Indecisiveness. At the other end of the scale, when faced with a complex decision that will be based on constantly changing data, it’s easy to continue to study the data, ask for one more report, or perform yet one more analysis before a decision gets made.

4. Remaining locked in the past. Some people make poor decisions because they’re using the same old data or processes they always have. Such people get used to approaches that worked in the past and tend not to look for approaches that will work better.

5. Having no strategic alignment. Bad decisions sometimes stem from a failure to connect the problem to the overall strategy. In the absence of a clear strategy that provides context, many solutions appear to make sense.

6. Over-dependence. Some decisions are never made because one person is waiting for another, who in turn is waiting for someone else’s decision or input. Effective decision makers find a way to act independently when necessary.

7. Isolation. Effective decision making recognizes that involving others with the relevant knowledge, experience, and expertise improves the quality of the decision.

8. Lack of technical depth. Organizations today are very complex, and even the best leaders do not have enough technical depth to fully understand multifaceted issues. But when decision makers rely on others’ knowledge and expertise without any perspective of their own, they have a difficult time integrating that information to make effective decisions.

9. Failure to communicate the what, where, when, and how associated with their decisions. Some good decisions become bad decisions because people don’t understand – or even know about — them. Communicating a decision, its rational and implications, is critical to the successful implementation of a decision.

10. Waiting too long for others’ input. Failing to know when to make a decision without all the right information and when to wait for more advice. It’s no wonder good people make bad decisions. The path to good decision making is narrow, and it’s far from straight.

Additional Reading

Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions by Zachary Shore

Think Smarter: Critical Thinking to Improve Problem-Solving and Decision-Making Skills

by Michael Kallet

Point of Reflection

“He who blames others has a long way to go on his journey. He who blames himself is halfway there. He who blames no one has arrived.”

Chinese Proverb