A wrong decision is often better than no decision at all.

• August 26, 2017
• Tumi Frazier

Do you put off making important or difficult decisions? How often have your colleagues or employees asked you for feedback and told them: “I’m still working on it or reviewing the situation”? The point is, taking too long to make decisions or set clear priorities can cause major challenges in your business.

As an entrepreneur, you can’t afford to spend too much time deliberating or simply not making decisions because analysis paralysis will eventually destroy your business. In essence, indecisiveness affects your reputation with staff, associates and clients including your team’s productivity because there is nothing as frustrating and demotivating as working with someone who is indecisive; it takes away the enthusiasm and sucks the energy out of others.

A recent study shows that high-performing leaders do not necessarily stand out for making great decisions all the time, rather they stand out for being decisive. They make decisions faster, sooner and with great conviction. In fact, they do so consistently even with incomplete information.

While there will be times when it may be necessary for you to wait in order to gather more information about the issue from multiple points of view but do not get in a habit of procrastinating in the pursuit of the perfect answer or perfect information. Realize that if you do not move soon, it may be too late. So, gather adequate information, analyze the data, challenge the data if necessary, weigh the factors that matter most, get other people’s perspectives and then make a decision.

It is also important to assess the impact of your decision in the likelihood that it turns out wrong. This said, it is not so much about making the wrong decision as it is about recognizing chaos and dealing head on with it instead of waiting and allowing ambiguity and confusion to fester in your business. Your business success depends on you making decisions and getting things done.

As Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan put it in their book The Discipline of Getting Things Done: “The greatest unaddressed issue in the business world and in teams today is the execution gap – the gap between knowing the goal and achieving it”.

So, execution is the biggest driver for business success and true leaders are defined by what they do not what they say.