 To improve your decision making, I'm sharing different methods to create the time and space to focus on the important decisions and reduce the time and energy spent on the less important decisions. We all make decisions every single day and we have been doing so for years. We live in an age of choice. Every day you are faced with so many decisions to make. If you give equal time and energy to each, you quickly become overloaded and end up making no decisions or poor decisions. In business, as your career progresses, the decisions you need to make increase in range and impact. Improving your decision making at work is more than just a sensible step. It can be career defining. To give you a process to practically sift through the decision making you're faced with, we're going through these seven steps to improve your decision making. At the end I share five methods or steps common in most practical decision making processes used in business. My name is Jess Coles and if you're new here, Enhance.training shares people management expertise, resources and courses to speed up your journey to become a great manager. I've included links to additional videos and resources in the description below as well as a video timestamp so do take a look at these. And if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. The first of seven steps to improve your decision making is to keep your goals in mind. Being clear on your goals is huge in making decisions more easily and quickly. In a business setting, if your goal is to hit a sales target, making the decision to pick up the phone another five times aligns with hitting your sales target. Getting a day off when you're just short of hitting your sales target goes against reaching your goal. Try to keep your decisions you need to make at work, align to your personal, team and business goals where it makes sense. Aligning decisions with goals saves you time and energy in the decision making process. Aligning decisions with goals works just as well in your personal life too. Another area to use as a reference to improve your decision making is your values and behaviours. Your values rarely change quickly, therefore using them as a reference point in your decision making keeps your decisions more consistent. This is very useful in managing teams as consistency of decision making is a critical behaviour to adopt if you want to reduce the people problems that you have to deal with in the team. The second step to improve your decision making is that impacts matter. If you're spending the same amount of time thinking about all your decisions stop right now. You are wasting a lot of your time and energy needlessly. All the decisions you have to make all have vastly different impacts. You know what coffee to buy in the mornings has no real impact. What career you pursue, who you marry, where you live, these are all decisions with large or huge long term impacts on your life. Start grouping your decisions by the impact each decision has on you, your team or the business. For decisions that have no real impact make the decision very quickly. You know go with your guts, your whim, whatever way works for you. Spend as little time and energy on the decision making process as possible. For the decisions that are low impact spend a bit more time considering the options or outsource the process to a suitably skilled team member to get to a recommendation. The aim is to minimise the time and energy you spend on these decisions so you create time to focus on the larger impact decisions. And for decisions with large impacts use time and energy to go through the options that you have available considering the upsides and downsides, the critical failure points, alignment with goals, how practical the decision would be to implement and all the other factors that we are covering to guide your decision. You should also consider if the impact of the decision is reversible or how easily or quickly you can change or reverse course if the decision that you make doesn't give you the result that you expect or need. The easier it is to recover or change from a decision the less energy or time you need to spend analysing the options. So think through who, what and how your decision will impact others before making it. The third of seven steps to improve your decision making is reduce the downsides. Removing the options with the largest downsides is a good way to cut down the time spent considering different options. Your decisions with large downsides are much harder to get signed off and to build the support needed to implement them within a business. Another route is to decide what is the worst case outcome that you are happy to live with and then remove any options from consideration which have downsides bigger than the worst case that you are happy with. Limiting the decisions with large downsides is an effective part of the process to improve your decision making at work. The fourth of seven steps to improve your decision making is use the time frames. Every decision has some kind of time frame attached. At work if you don't make a decision in the time frames needed you let somebody down or you miss the opportunity or your problems increase. When you have identified the important decisions what you don't want to do is put off making a decision until the last minute. Start work as soon as you can to gather options, consider the impacts, the pros and cons, the resources needed etc. Don't start this at the last minute because you are a lot more likely to miss something vital and make a decision that you regret later. Rushing important decisions or decisions that have complex impacts reduces the chances of making a good decision. And on the flip side for decisions with little or no impact don't procrastinate or put them off. Make a quick decision or outsource them and get them off your list of to-dos. This clears your mental space for the decisions with a lot more impact. The fifth of seven steps to improve a decision making is to keep an open mind. We go into most decisions with a preference based on our experience, our emotions and our assumptions. Being aware of our preferences and why we have those preferences is critical to making good decisions. I have literally lost count of the number of times that I started a decision making process with a preference and after going through the data and the opinions of others realised that there was a better solution or a better decision to take. Don't allow yourself to become too emotionally invested in a course of action or a decision that blinds you to better options. And also try not to make a decision and then go looking for evidence or logic to back up your decision, what's called a confirmation bias. We all do this to some extent. Counter it by asking what if questions and looking for the problems too. Making problems with decisions or the implementation of those decisions while it is on paper is so much better, easier and less embarrassing than after the implementation started. So keep an open mind and don't be afraid to change direction towards a better decision. The sixth of seven steps to improve a decision making is to use data to check opinions. Everyone has an opinion and many of them at work are influenced by agendas, emotions, experiences and assumptions that you're not actually aware of. Using others or your team members to help with important decisions can be extremely useful. You get different viewpoints, different challenges, different thinking, all of which can help unearth better options and better decisions, particularly for difficult or complex decisions with big impacts. I found it extremely useful to check the data available against opinions and recommendations to make sure the opinions and recommendations fit what the data is saying. This acts as a check to reduce bias in other people's opinions and reduce the will being pulled over your eyes. That being said, check how the data is put together, if it gives a complete enough picture of what is happening and if the data is inaccurate or misleading. If opinions and data are very different, dig into the detail to find out which you should give more weight to. And don't get caught up with data paralysis. You need enough data to help you make a decision rather than every bit of data available. This is ultimately a judgement call. You need enough, not everything. And lastly, try to avoid making the perfect decision. Usually you're balancing between bad options or OK options. Rarely is there a standout option that screams pick me. And if you find this, the decision is a lot easier. Good enough decisions are what you should aim for, as a general rule. Obviously the higher the impact, the better the decision you should aim to make. The seventh step to improve your decision making is decision time or actually making the decision. Making no decision is often the worst of all options. Delays and indecisiveness can lead to a lot of frustration and lost opportunities. Making a poor decision is often better than making no decision. Pick your decision or accept the recommendation of others or ask others to help in the decision making process, whichever route you need to take to get to the best decision you can before your timeframes run out. Most decision making processes in business include these steps or methods. Firstly, describe the decision to be made. Secondly, consider the impact of the decision. Third, gather information, data and options. Fourth, consider the support needed for the decision to be implemented. And fifth, make a decision and then implement it. Use the steps that I've outlined to categorize the decisions that you're faced with so you have more time and energy for the important ones. And then use these five methods I've just mentioned to improve your decision making to get the best decision you're able to. Make your decision and then ensure that your decision will be implemented or put into action. A decision without action doesn't achieve very much. Act on your decisions or ensure that others act on them on your behalf. In summary, because we have so many decisions to make each day, we've gone through seven steps to improve your decision making by reducing the time and energy spent on the decisions with little impact. This gives you a lot more time and energy to focus on the decisions with larger impacts. This approach improves the quality of your decision making for the decisions that really count. The seven steps are, firstly, keep your goals in mind. Secondly, impacts matter. Third, reduce the downsides. Fourth, use the time frames. Fifth, keep an open mind. Sixth, use data to check opinions. And then seventh, decision time. And if you have any questions on the seven steps to improve your decision making, please leave in the comments section below and I'll get back to you. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.