Project Manager Decisiveness

Decisiveness, that ability to make quick and unambiguous decisions, is a trait often associated with great leaders, especially great military leaders. But how does that kind of decision-making fit into the demands of modern program management and when is a more deliberate, data-driven approach called for?  What is your decision-making style and how do you adjust it to situational demands?  

 This article addresses questions like these by presenting some points to consider about decisiveness and gives some scenarios and an exercise to help you gain some insight into your own decision-making style.

Just like any aspect of leadership, desisiveness is not a simple, all-or-nothing trait.  Leaders don't just fall into two categories: those who are extremely decisive and those who are always indecisive. Instead, most of us fall somewhere in between those two extremes. 

Let's picture decisiveness as a line with one end representing leaders who typically make snap decisions (“Winging It” in the graphic below) while the other end represents those who essentially need to be forced to make a decision (“Analysis Paralysis” in the graphic below). As suggested in the graphic, leaders on the one extreme will make decisions as soon as they’re aware that there’s a decision to be made. People on the opposite, “Analysis Paralysis” extreme will delay making a decision until deadlines or events absolutely force them to do so. Individuals who are between these extremes (that is, most of us) will commit to a decision somewhere between these two points in time. Therefore the question is not “Are you decisive or not?” but rather “Where do you sit on that line between those two extremes?”

Are you always at the same point on that line? Probably not. Situations can push you one way or the other on that line, making you to adjust your decision-making to the circurmstances you face.  Leaders will differ in how much they tailor their decision-making to a situation, with some holding fairly tightly to a single decision-making style while others freely adapt their decision-making to situational demands.

Decisiveness and Situational Demands

In some cases, a situation will leave you no freedom about when you make a decision.  For example, if you have to suddenly come up with a revised project schedule by lunchtime, you’ll make the decisions that you have to make to make that happen. In that case, your natural level of decisiveness isn't reflected in how quickly you made the decisions but in how painful it was for you to make them that quickly. If it was a breeze you’re probably generally comfortable with making  decisions based on whatever you know at that moment. If that experience was as pleasant as a root canal, you’re probably someone who’s more comfortable making heavily data-driven decisions.

When time is less of a driving factor you have more freedom to use your decision-making style and it's therefore easier to recognize. If that deadline for revising the schedule was two weeks away, when would you make the decisions about the needed schedule changes? Would you:

• Still want to make the best decisions you can now with what information you have at-hand, or
• Use a few days to get some information and input and then make your decisions, or
• Use a rolling decision-making process by making incremental decisions and revisions as events happen, right up to the last possible day?

The right answer to that question is that there’s no absolutely right answer. Other aspects of the situation would probably influence how decisive you could afford to be. 

Overall then it seems that there are two things that drive how a manager makes a decision:

• The manager's decision-making style that inclines him or her to be more or less decisive in general. This is based on factors like the manager's history, personality, and degree of comfort with the content and context of the decision
• How much the manager is inclined and able to adapt his or her decision-making to the situation's demands. This tendency to accommodate situational demands is indicated by the width of the line beneath each individual in the graphic above.

As a result, managers will differ in both their general level of decisiveness and how widely they adapt that decisiveness to different situations, as suggested in the graphic.

So where do you fit in this model?  In the next two pages, we'll work through some scenarios and then an exercise to help you develop some insight into your decision-making style.  First, let's turn to the decision-making scenarios . . .