Are You Wrestling With Too Many Tough Business Decisions?

Decisions Can Become Much Like Balancing Plates On Sticks

Wrestling with yourself, again?  I try not to do that little step in my business life.  If you catch yourself worrying about the decisions you made recently, you might be wrestling with yourself just a little bit.  Once you make a decision, regardless of how hard that decision is, make sure you wipe it clean from your daily thoughts and get on with it.  Some of the best leaders this country has ever seen in the history of the business world made it a habit to make decisions and move on.  The greatest ones could rarely be found changing the tough decisions they decided to make.  They worked long and hard gathering all of the pertinent information related to the tough decisions, but once they found all the information they needed to gather they decided what to do and did it.  They never looked back.  It was done.  That is how they lived a tough decision life.

If you make tough decisions, which in the business world you will undoubtedly do, make sure you do not place yourself in the position of questioning your decisions.  Once you make them, card is played.  It's a done deal.  Learn how to be good for the word you set down.  Become known for your steadfast ways on the decisions you deliver.  Be known for the leadership trust others can expect from someone who does what he says he will do.  When you decide that one is one...then one better remain one.

When leaders make bad decisions on tough issues it is because they did not gather all of the right material and proper information to use for them to develop a more accurate decision choice.  Bad decisions come in a variety of ways.  The short list of ways that a leader makes bad decisions may include favoritism, poor data collection, inaccuracy in material gathered, prejudice, impatience, insensitivity, intolerance, stubbornness and stupidity.  These are some of the basic traits that help a leader find more ways to wrestle with the decisions they make.  These conditions allow the leader a wide range of future chances to discover how badly their previous decisions were made.  They will discover many opportunities to wrestle with the some of the wrongs a badly made decision eventually delivers.  I have worked with some leaders that find themselves wrestling with some very difficult decisions.  Those decisions are worth wrestling with because the previous ones were not made with good decision policies and practices.  Holes and inaccuracies littered some of the decisions that led up to the one that is being wrestled.  Previous decisions were not accurate enough to protect the results from going sour.  If you find yourself wrestling with tough decisions often, maybe you need to examine more closely the method you are using to make the difficult decisions you face.  Are you wrestling with too many tough business decisions?

As I have mentioned in some of my previous posts, I have been employed four times to repair a broken business model I did not own.  It is truly some very ugly work.  One thing I have discovered in that career process, there are not very many allies on those paths of recovery.  Those business models were a mess for a reason.  They did not find economic troubles of this magnitude by mistake.  The troubled business models are always lead by poor decision makers.  They are littered with examples of wrestling matches with a long line of terrible decisions.  Troubled business models are traveling the business world driving a model that is trying to navigate the consumer world with a well over-weighted cargo load stemming from poor decision-making practices.  The model is usually loaded down with too many wrong decisions.  The results have finally caught up with the poor policies practiced on the decision table.  When a broken business model decides to insert a new person to come in and 'fix' the problems of poor profitability, it will discover how 'pointed' that new leader will become.  The method for making decisions will need to change.  The new leader hired to 'fix' the problems will need to make a serious effort to change the way decision are being made.  The current leaders of that failing business model will find that new effort very offensive.  Not one reader cruising through this particular post today actually believes they are a poor decision maker.  Unfortunately, some of you are.  That is also the case for every single broken business model.  The decision makers have failed.

I can assure you that many decision makers will not agree with me on this perspective.  In every single case where I was hired to repair the broken business model, this perspective was true.  The decision makers did not believe they made bad decisions.  Everyone of them believed they had some bad things happen to their business model that was out of their control so they have hired someone to come in and 'fix' those bad circumstances.  That is exactly how every owner behaved when I was hired to help them repair.  Not one of them truly believed they practiced poor decision making practices.  In every case, that was the true source for their near demise.  Picture this if you can.  The poor decision makers have come to the conclusion they need to hire a repair leader to help them fix what they have not done well.  Yet, they do not believe they have made bad decisions to get what they are experiencing.  Nice.  Only a seriously deranged leader would take on a project of that nature, right?  Welcome, me, the seriously deranged leader.  I have walked into that kind of business room four times in my career.  Not one of them was fun.

Leaders that fail often are leaders that fail at the decision making table.  They are leaders that wrestle often with their past decisions.  They are leaders that practice wrong decision making techniques with the true expectation that some good results should arrive anyway.  They also do not admit that they are the reasons for the failures they experience.  This truth is always one hundred percent true.  They bring aboard a 'fixer' person to help them correct what is wrong but they do not expect that 'fixer' person to change how they operate what they do.  It is comical to witness.  It is also one hundred percent accurate.  I have no reason to make this stuff up.  I do not benefit from telling the reader this truth.  If you are wrestling with past decisions, you may need to clean up how you make decisions in the first place.  It is always worth examination.  Always.

Are you wrestling with too many tough business decisions?

I like to rest more often than I deserve.  I do it anyway.  I like sitting by an open fire outside in the star-filled night.  I find that kind of rest very rewarding.  There is some great peace that comes from taking the mind out of gear for a little while and permitting it to rest without concerns about business issues for a short while.  An open fire in the burning pit on a calm, clear night sky can provide the atmosphere for taking my mind to a restful place.  It has become one of my favorite babbling brooks.  Every leader is faced with tough business decisions in their leadership career.  That is one of the pure constants of leadership.  Tough decisions will always appear.  They come with the leadership role.  Welcome to leadership.

If a business owner does not have the desire to face tough business decisions in their business model, they have no business being in charge of that model.  I have met hundreds of business owners who do not possess the proper skills for being quality leaders.  I do not remember one of those business owners who was successful in the model they managed who lacked the 'right' qualities for being a good leader.  Not one.  Good leadership skills are a minimum requirement for business success to occur.  If you own a business model and your leadership skills are not perfected on a daily basis, you lack the proper skills to lead your model to a great series of wonderful successes.  If you did not work on improving your leadership skills yesterday, you are not performing your ownership with good leadership practices.  Face it, you need some help with improving your leadership skills.  The path of improved leadership is always a constant.  If you travel one day at work without paying any attention to some of the steps you applied to the decisions you make, you are not practicing good leadership.  Ignore this fact and continue to suffer.

I can assure every reader that their leadership skills are often sitting at the resting table.  This kind of practice, resting the disciplines of good leadership attention, will eventually lead that leader into making some terribly bad decisions.  Those bad decisions will come back to invite that leader into a new wrestling match.  Junk will re-appear and the leader will be faced with wrestling around on the stuff that should have already been resolved.  This is exactly how a business model becomes broken.  The leader fails at the leadership game.  There is no other good excuse.

I can blame the past manager.  I can blame the previous employees.  I can blame the sour economy.  I can blame the current leaders.  I can blame the customer change in regional demographics.  I can blame anything that will work.  The truth remains, my leadership is faced with making better decisions on those tough things that arrive to impact my business model.  When I manage that better, my business results will improve tremendously.  Good business results often come from tough success on difficult decisions made.  A leader who constantly works on improving their leadership skills will be the ones who have the best chance for producing good results consistently.  This is one of the toughest truths for a business owner to accept.  I wrestle with this truth myself, often.

Learn how to rest your mind when your mind needs resting.  Give it some opportunities to visit whatever babbling brook you find worthy.  Make sure you go to that babbling brook on a regular basis, without skipping out on the pressing responsibilities you need to manage.  Take care of your resting needs.  Rest and relaxation are a minimum must.  Get better at managing these important factors in your leadership development.  Once you get good at rest and relaxation go back to work on gathering relevant, important, valid, accurate, fair and pertinent information for helping you to make better tough decisions.  It is not always the best thing to do when your simple decisions do not include proper attention.  I have had simple decisions come back to bite me hard when I have failed to give them proper attention.  Pay closer attention to the moving world about you.  That is what good leaders do.  They miss very few signals.  They see what others do not see.  They hear what others do not hear.  They consider what others might ignore.  Work on improving your awareness skills.  Your future depends greatly upon how well you gather proper information when you have a tough decision to make.

Be slow to gather, quick to decide once the proper gathering is done and stick to the way you decided to go.  These are the marks of a great leader.  Quit wrestling with too many tough business decisions that should have already been solved.  Remain consistent with what you decide, especially if it is working well.

Wrestlers require a lot of tough training to do well.  So do decision makers.

Until next time...