 worried you won't make the right decision? Our tips today will set you up for success. Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. As leaders we're expected to make decisions every day but how do we know if we're making the right one? Today I've got five tips for you that'll help you go through a process for making great decisions. And stay tuned to the end I'm going to give you a link where you can download a checklist that you can use to apply the tips in this video. We often hear that great leaders are decisive and the best leaders seem to make decisions very quickly and very easily. Some people are fortunate enough to be born with this trait but the rest of us have to learn it like any other skill. One of the best tools you can use to improve your decision-making capabilities is the follow-up problem-solving framework. Now Toyota has their eight-step problem-solving framework you've probably heard about and when I was in the Air Force we had a modified version of this that we used a little bit differently. I'm going to take these frameworks I'm going to give you a link to these in the description below so if you want to go look up these original frameworks you can go look at them but I might take some of these and reorder some of the steps and I'm going to modify them a little bit because I think it makes it a little easier to remember and I think it makes a little more sense to do the steps in this order. So but you can go look at the originals if you want to and remember when you're trying to make a decision it's important to be thoroughly deliberate even if you're trying to make a decision quickly and even though there's multiple steps to this problem-solving framework I'm going to give you you can move through them even just up in your head we'd even without writing anything down you can move through these steps fairly quickly but it's important to be thorough and deliberate as you do. Step number one is to analyze the problem and this consists of two parts first it's identifying what the problem is the real problem not just what we perceive the problem to be and then second we're going to break the problem down into smaller component problems that will need to solve along the way. Now these both of these steps require us to be honest with ourselves about what the problem really is you've heard people say admitting you have a problem is the first step and that's no different here now you may be looking at this as well I don't have a problem I'm really trying to solve someone came to me and said here are two or three options I needed to choose between I needed to choose one of them well that's okay but it's always a good exercise it's always a good part of the problem solving process to go back to what the initial problem is what problem are these two or three options trying to solve when you take a look at that when you identify the real problem these options are trying to solve and you go look at the smaller component problems this will give you great insight into what solutions might solve the whole problem and all the smaller component problems and honestly if there isn't a problem these options are trying to solve these these solutions are proposed to solve why are you really making a decision about it now anyway step number two is to find the root cause of the problem now some of the other frameworks I talked about have this a little little later in the process but I think it's important to get this straight before moving on to some of the other steps now this requires again this requires some honesty and it's going to require a lot of patience because we need to keep digging we need to keep asking why and how to really get down to the root cause we want to get down to that point where we can't ask those questions why or how anymore like I said sometimes in other frameworks this is later in the process but as you start to get to the goals as you start to get to the areas improvement that you want to solve as part of this problem it's important to understand what these root causes are because if you get resource constrained you might want to prioritize on what's going to give you the most bang for the buck or what's the most important thing to solve first so I think it's important to get to the root cause before you get to setting your goals which is the next step but if you want to go set your goals first that'll work for you too next step set your goals for improvement whenever you're setting goals here at evil genius leadership we talk about making them clear measurable and achievable I won't go into all the details on how to do that we've got another video for that and I'll put a link down in the description so you can go watch that if you're interested in how to make your goals clear measurable and achievable but you want to make those goals for the entire problem you're trying to solve you don't want to leave any of it out you want to address all the smaller problems that you broke the problem into in the first step and the root causes that go along with that problem and the reason you want to do this is you may be time or resource constrained on what you can put together if you've got all the time in the world and all the resources in the world great no problem right but if you're resource constrained like most of us are you may want to choose one or two goals that are going to address the root causes of the problems that are move the needle the most and get you the most improvement step number four is to create and evaluate courses of action this is where you go build those plans to go achieve the goals you just set in the last step and you want to come up with multiple options and you want to evaluate multiple options because you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket some options may be better at others than addressing the whole problem even though they may look good at first and the way you can do this a great tool you can do use to evaluate these courses of action is to create and write down your evaluation criteria before your team comes up with the actual solutions so go right down kind of the framework of what the solution needs to achieve in order to meet the goal and that'll help you choose the best solution or solutions that you want to implement simultaneously to go forward and achieve those goals the last step of the process is to implement and assess once you've chosen the best solution or solutions that you want to go implement go forth and do it and keep tracking how well you're doing on those solutions are you on track for your goal are you a little bit ahead of your goal are you behind your goal and as you're looking at the numbers don't lose the force for the trees on the numbers of tracking your goal are the root causes going away or do you look like they're starting to reoccur that can give you a lot of insight qualitatively in addition to the way you're quantitatively tracking your goals and once you've met your goal now it's time to say okay do we want to double down on this goal instead of a more ambitious goal or maybe do we want to move on to a problem that's going to move the needle a little further for us so don't be satisfied don't stop just because you met your goal reassess and see if there's more for you to do later on so the eight step process is from Toyota and the Air Force that I mentioned earlier have one more step and that's to standardize the solution and share the success across the organization now you may not be working for a bigger organization you may be a very small team or a small business but if you are in an organization where it's important to take the lessons you've learned from from your problem solving process make sure you standardize those lessons get them written down and share them across the organization because they may be valuable to someone else and when it comes to success no matter what size your organization make sure you give your team the credit they deserve for going to the problem solving process helping you make the decision and coming up the solution and I know this was really focused on a problem solving framework but this is the kind of thing if you've got to make a decision you can always go through this five step these five steps and apply these five steps even if you just do it up in your head you don't need to write it down if you just step through these five steps that can go help you make any decision quickly remember it's not it's not about making decisions fast you can always make a decision fast but it's important when you're making a decision to be deliberate and thorough and that'll help you get to making the best decision possible for you and your team if you found this helpful please like comment and share it with a friend or co-worker click on the link below in the description that'll take you to where you can download a little checklist guide that'll help you apply the five problem solving steps we talked about in this video if you have any business or leadership questions leave us a comment below we'd love to hear from you or email us at info at evilgeniusleadership.com evilgeniusleadership.com is also where you can learn about all of our coaching and training programs so if you're interested in some one-on-one coaching to develop your leadership style and your leadership skills or want to bring us in to help with your team and do some leadership development as a team let us know contact us and we'll set you up with a free consultation to see how we can help thanks for watching today i really appreciate it and remember the future is out there lead the way