Do you dedicate your time to the activities that will yield the most impactful results on the organization and your team’s mission?
As a leader, your reputation is, in essence, the sum of your collective decisions. Basically, you’re paid to decide — it’s that simple. High-value decisions result in the actions that bring disproportionate progress toward the organization’s mission, vision, and WIGs. Assess how you spend your time by asking yourself, “Is what I am doing now, or what I am going to do next, progressing our mission and vision or our Wildly Important Goals?”
In The 5 Choices: The Path to Extraordinary Productivity, the authors write that high-value decisions result from:
- Working on the important, not the urgent — going for the extraordinary, not the ordinary.
- Focusing one’s attention on the right things — how leaders prioritize and manage their time.
- Having sustained energy. Leaders who burn out and don’t renew their energy won’t have the capacity to recognize and drive high-value decisions to completion.
- Best practices for high-value decision making include:
- Focus. With unlimited choices comes the temptation to take on those that don’t meet the high-value criteria.
- Don’t go it alone. If you’re stuck, feeling disenfranchised, or just can’t decide between two compelling but incompatible choices, get help.
- Don’t go for the easy wins. As leaders, we may be tempted to play to our strengths, find the path of least resistance, and go for the easy wins that will bring recognition and reward. But rarely is that the path that leads to high-value decisions.
FROM MESS TO SUCCESS: MAKE HIGH-VALUE DECISIONS
- Remember, your reputation is the totality of your decisions, not only in your professional life, but also in your personal life. In fact, your whole life.
- Use the bulleted “messes” above as an assessment. What will you work on?
- Go for the extraordinary. High-value decisions are rarely grounded in the ordinary.
- Regularly challenge your decision making to determine whether it should be elevated. Shouldn’t your decision-making capacity improve each week? What are you doing to assess the outcomes of your previous decisions and surpass them going forward?
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