Whether making big or small decisions, how we instinctively make them is useful to understand as we commit to our Big Impact strategies and design fresh decision pledges. Our personalities are awash with unique tendencies, which we can profile using any one of the popular frameworks around. If we take a behavioural structure like DiSC,22 often used in business training to help teams empathize with each other’s distinctiveness so they collaborate better, we will find we each have a preponderance toward one of four personality types and colours – Dominant (Red), Influential (Yellow), Steady (Green) and Conscientious (Blue). Each type has a different decision-making style:
- Dominant (Red) individuals generally prefer making quick decisions based on logic and assertiveness.
- Influential (Yellow) individuals may prioritize inspiring and motivating the team with gut-instinct decisions to maintain momentum.
- Steady (Green) individuals may emphasize harmony and take more time to consider the impact of decisions on relationships and team dynamics.
- Conscientious (Blue) individuals may focus on gathering detailed information, analyzing data and ensuring accuracy before reaching a decision.
To work out your DiSC profile, here’s a quick way to estimate your style. First, do you consider yourself more questioning and sceptical, or more accepting and warm? If the former, you will be either a D or C style, the latter, an I or S style. Now, do you consider yourself fast-paced and outspoken, or more cautious and reflective? If the former, you will be either a D or I style, the latter, you will be either a C or S style. Combine the two answers, and you have your personal DiSC style.
So, when my clients sit before me deliberating over a decision, I see clouds of colour billowing around them. “Yup, ’twas the red in you that now sees you unemployed, poppet. It would have been wiser to be less impetuous when you resigned in that huff,” or “You didn’t make the offer quickly enough and now you’ve lost the house? Aha, I see. I see a little too much green wafting here.”
We are not taught decision-making in school, and I see this as a glaring gap. Decisions are crucial to our impact, so understanding any bias we may have toward making decisions a certain way and when to bend this into a mix of alternative decision-making strategies – for example, to seek a variety of advice, which may feel unnatural to us initially – is crucial to evolve successfully into our lives and worlds. Too much of red, yellow, green or blue doesn’t always work. Just because knee-jerk red helps you feel in control, it doesn’t mean you’re making the right judgement calls and perhaps a little more blue is needed in this scenario to slow down and evaluate what else and who else your decision will affect. Equally, poring over swathes of information, getting stuck in analysis paralysis, won’t serve your company, nor your career. It’s up to you to become acutely aware of how you decide and when you need to flex from your default method, to bring in more colours from the primary palette.
Excerpted from Big Impact Without Burnout: 8 Energizing Strategies to Stop Struggling and Start Soaring, by Bianca Best. Watkins Publishing, March 11, 2025. Order your copy here.