When you become a CEO for the first time, one of the most important skills you’ll constantly have to be learning is decision making. It’s amazing how much forward momentum comes from good executive decisions. Some decisions in life are tough to make, but as a CEO, everyone you tackle will have an impact on the future direction of the business, and your livelihood.
Here are some helpful decision-making pointers for any first-time business owner.
Time Is Money
This old saying about business has survived for so long for one main reason: it’s true! When you become a business owner, you have to start practicing speed in your decision making, starting with the smaller choices. Time is precious to any CEO, but when you’re just starting out, it’s so much more important. Try to give yourself a bias towards action rather than indecision, and accept that fact that you’ll have to take a risk sometimes.
This can be hard to do if you’re used to the structured, low-pressure environment of a nine-to-five, but once you accomplish it, making quick decisions will come much more naturally to you. Like many characteristics, decisiveness is a mental muscle, that can only be built by working it out.
Separate the Reversible from the Irreversible
When we come up against decisions that are hard to make, it’s usually because they seem so big and daunting that it requires a lot of deliberation. To make things easier on yourself, start each decision-making process by determining if it’s reversible or irreversible. If you’re thinking of shifting your marketing to a new customer segment or integrating some service contract management software, then these can be undone later with relative ease.
If you’re setting a firm date on the calendar when you’ll launch a new product, etc, these aren’t going to be nearly as easy to turn around. When the decisions are reversible, make a point to limit the time you spend chewing them over. Avoid over-analysing the whole issue. Invest more time thinking about the possible outcomes, the pros and cons, and how easy it would be to recover in the worst-case scenario.
It can also help to network with business owners who have been through similar situations, and ask about their experiences.
Those Who Forget the Past…
To make the best decisions in the future, it’s essential to review decisions you’ve made in the past. Analyse how these turned out and use what you learn to make better choices in the future.
Even if there are decisions that you think couldn’t have turned out better, it’s important to gather feedback from other sources and bring this into the equation.
This might come from your clients and customers, your staff, your partners, and if you’re able to look at it objectively, yourself. This will help you tweak your decision-making process, tailoring it to the needs of your business.
Those who forget the past, as they say, are doomed to repeat it!
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