Many people are reeling with all the crazy things going on in the world and our business lives. It’s not surprising many people are struggling with indecisiveness.
So how do you rise above these challenges to become more decisive?
Here are four tips:
1. Delegate
Do a scan of all your responsibilities and determine what you can delegate to others. And if you’re finding it hard to let go of some hands-on responsibilities, that may be part of the issue. Ask yourself:
Why am I reluctant to let go of _______?
More often than not, understanding and dealing with why you’re reluctant to delegate makes it easier to start offloading responsibilities.
2. Develop and Use a Standardized Process for Making Tough Decisions
It’s helpful to build a process that considers all variables. Here’s an example:
When your team members come up with new ideas to implement, have them fill out a standardized form that includes:
- Background info on the idea
- Rationale
- Resources needed
- Projected financial impact
That way, your analysis will be minimal, a simple “yes” or “no.”
One of my clients followed this approach, and it made the approval process much more streamlined. As a result, more ideas became a reality, which benefited the company.
3. Construct Your Process to Prevent Repetitive Decision Making
When you create your standardized process, make sure it prevents the tendency to make the same types of decisions repeatedly.
Here’s a real-life example:
I teamed with a brand-new Business Development organization to develop a sales process. Sales employees were making decisions based on “gut-level instinct,” while they ignored significant opportunities. Pursuit decisions were one-offs, causing repeated conversations with the Director for approvals, even for low-dollar volume opportunities.
The team and I got to work. We created a robust process that allowed for some opportunities to fly under the radar with little oversight, while others required higher-level approvals and more monitoring. For example, a $100M opportunity would need approvals by a VP, while a 1st level manager could approve a $500K opportunity.
The results were outstanding! Over a period of nine years, the process resulted in an increase in sales from $85M to +$300M.
Another thing you can do to elevate your business processes to the next level is to automate them. Doing so can take even more manual decisions and activities out of the equation. A tool like the Accelerate Platform is an excellent example of this.
4. Take Good Care of Yourself
Taking care of ourselves is an area where many of us struggle. But what if we made this a priority? It’s a known fact that taking better care of ourselves contributes to better decision-making. If we would do this regularly, could you imagine the positive impacts of all the decisions we’d make? That’s a great foundation upon which to build a business!
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If you’d like to make that foundation even stronger by improving your processes, I can help with that!
Click here to schedule a virtual coffee. I’d love to learn more about your organization and explore potential ways to help take it to the next level!