TRUTH 4 Know your decision-making style

When I ask my wife how she makes decisions, she says she follows her heart. This is not just an excuse for bypassing formal, rational analysis that is such an essential part of classical decision making. It is also a sense that if you make a decision that you feel passionately about, you will put your heart and soul behind the decision. While I take a more rational approach, sometimes, I do appreciate where her heart has taken us.

Some people, like my wife, take an intuitive approach to decisions, while others would not think about making a decision without careful and formal analysis. These are very different styles of decision making. (In their book The Dynamic Decision Maker: Five Decision Styles for Executive and Business Success, Michael Driver, Kenneth Brousseau, and Philip Hunsaker consider a broader range of five different styles of decision making—decisive, flexible, hierarchic, integrative, and systemic.)

You need to understand your own preferred style of making decisions. Recognize that you’re probably not a pure example of one approach or another. You might use different styles for different types of decisions. Some managers who pursue a rational approach at work might choose a more intuitive approach in making personal decisions. You also might choose a different approach for decisions under tight timeframes versus those with longer lead times.

In addition to understanding your own style, you need to understand the styles of the people around you. If you’re surrounded by logical decision makers, even if you arrive at your decision by intuition, you will want to present a logical argument for your plan. This might seem deceptive, but it could be the only way to get buy-in from people who expect decisions to be based on rational analysis. On the other hand, if you have to explain a rational decision to someone who is more intuitive or makes decisions based on feelings, you might need to find a way to appeal to the heart.

Recognizing your own style and those of others creates an opportunity to experiment with other ways of approaching decisions. Try a style that is not your natural one and see how it works out. It may be that you will want to incorporate it into your future decisions.