Suck It Up: How to Address Your Decision-Making Vacuums

There are many challenges involved in business management. One of the biggest is being the person who's willing to stand up and take responsibility for a decision that could decide the future of the company.

While this can sometimes feel like a lonely position to be in, you certainly don't have to go through the decision-making process alone. In fact, it's always a good idea to gather as many opinions and perspectives as possible before forming any concrete ideas.

The buck might stop with you when it comes to making the final call, but you're much more likely to reach the best possible conclusion if you've collected an extensive and diverse range of insights along the way.

So how can you make sure you're always open to collaboration and not making big decisions in a vacuum?

Take a step-by-step approach

Big decisions feel much less intimidating and much more approachable when they're broken up into smaller chunks.

If you're embarking on an initiative like relaunching your sales and marketing strategy, for example, it’ll feel a lot easier to navigate if you view it as a series of distinct stages, rather than one vast project.

As well as making the entire process feel easier to navigate, this approach can help you benefit from collaboration because you can invite opinions from relevant groups and stakeholders at each step of the journey.

The procurement team can offer advice on products and services that will help the process run as smoothly as possible, for instance, while the finance department can guide your thinking on budget and costs.

Identify a common purpose

Incorporating a wide range of voices and insights into every decision you make becomes a lot easier when other people in the business have a genuine interest in achieving the best outcome. It's important, therefore, to ensure the ultimate goals and rationale driving every decision are communicated to the entire business.

Make sure teams and individuals at all levels of the company understand why this decision is being made and how they stand to benefit from the business reaching the best possible outcome. As well as helping you incorporate more opinions and insights into the decision-making process, this will make your entire workforce feel more involved in the firm's growth and development.

If you're not able to easily identify your goals and express them in a succinct and instantly comprehensible way, it could be a sign that you need to rethink your objectives to make them clearer.

Encourage open communication

Healthy communication is critical to the success of every business, and it becomes particularly important when you're making big decisions that require input and guidance from as many people as possible.

Creating a culture that values openness and collaboration, in which people at all levels of seniority and from any department can come forward and share their ideas, will help to ensure that no decision is made without various views being taken into account.

Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, underlines the value of this approach in his book Creativity, Inc. He points out that, in the past, the company made the mistake of confusing communication structure with the hierarchical nature of the organization itself.

You can create a truly collaborative workplace culture by encouraging all employees, regardless of the department they're in or how long they've been working for you, to view each other as peers.

Bring different voices together

Some of the most valuable ideas and insights into key decisions can emerge when you encourage collaboration between people who don't normally work together.

A brainstorming session with representatives of various departments, all with different skill sets and specialisms, can yield much more interesting and surprising results than an internal team meeting, for example.

It’ll certainly give you more to think about than any amount of time spent mulling over decisions and considering different options without any outside input. When you need to get out of a decision-making vacuum, look for fresh perspectives that could lead to an entirely new approach.

As noted by Mr Catmull, "inspiration can, and does, come from anywhere".