Project Manager Decisiveness

Improving Your Decision Making

Where do we go from here? Since decision making is such a core element of leadership and project management, it’s worth making it a focus item in your professional development. There are certainly resources and training aplenty available about decision making, but it all begins with the self-knowledge of how you go about arriving at decisions under different circumstances and how you might do it better. No trainer or book can simply give you that self-knowledge; it ultimately depends on your awareness of and insight into the demands of the situations you face daily and your reactions to them.

Try something like this: every six months or so take a week during which you end your workday by jotting down the job-related decisions you made that day. Then spend an hour at the end of the week reviewing those decisions with respect to considerations like:

• What did you base the decision on? How much of your decision was based on a “gut feel” drawn from prior experience and how much was based on information and input about this particular situation? How many unknowns did you have to assume away to make your decision?
• Why did you make the decision when you did? Was there more time available and, if so, would there have been any value in taking it? Could you have reached the same decision earlier and, if so, what might have been the benefit of doing so?
• How solitary or inclusive was the decision making? Was it the type of decision that you absolutely had to make by yourself? If not, would there have been any value in taking the time to include others in the decision making process, either in improving the quality of the decision through a broader base of knowledge and perspectives or in providing side benefits like greater buy-in, improved team dynamics, or the professional development of your staff?
• How did you communicate the decision? How will everyone who is needed to implement the decision, or is substantively affected by it, learn about it?

As you work through these decisions, look for patterns in how you approach decision making. Ignoring the outcome of the decision making for the moment, see if there are similarities in how you went about making different types of decisions. Also, look to see if there are any similarities with what you saw in your review six months earlier. The earlier results can also help you assess the success and effect of any changes you had been trying to incorporate into your decision making.

There are few universally valid goals in developing your level of decisiveness. What’s right is what works best for you in your position and circumstances. That aside, you would want to avoid being at either extreme position on the decisiveness continuum but rather achieve some balance between those two tendencies. That would usually be a secondary goal, however, since so few individuals actually operate in such an extreme manner.

A more important goal is to improve how well you tailor your decision making to the range of situations you encounter in your position and organization. The dynamic and complex environment in which project managers operate demands an adaptable approach to every project management function. Therefore, broadening your repertoire of decision making methods will give you more flexibility in meeting the extensive range of challenges you will face in your current and future positions. Identifying your current decision making method(s) and areas in which they can be expanded to accommodate situational demands will prepare you to apply the best available method for arriving at the types of decisions you make routinely as a project manager.