Should you merge or acquire; buy, sell or hold? Business decisions are often more critical than, “Fries or salad with that?” Given the nature of your work decisions, have you ever considered your decision process and whether it’s optimal?

I’ve interviewed several CEOs and Presidents and, one after another, they talk about consciously adhering to a decision making process. In fact, Executive Intelligence Magazine states: “When it comes to foretelling management success, the real proof is one’s ability to quickly and effectively process large amounts of information and use it to make decisions that drive the right kind of actions.”

While everyone is unique, I generally recommend the following decision making process:

  Clearly frame the action required

  Link it to one of your key priorities

  Review your assumptions

  Determine whether there is enough information to act

Even with the best laid plans, however, various pressures and habits prevent managers from making decisions efficiently. Excessive multi-tasking is a common culprit. When we’re working on several things at once (often the case these days) it’s natural to avoid harder decisions in favour of easier tasks.

Waiting for the perfect information can also create setbacks in your decisions. It’s natural to be concerned about making mistakes without all the facts, especially when many of our decisions seem mission critical. In most cases, experts agree that opting for a more immediate decision based on sufficient information is better than a delay. If you need to sleep on something, create a draft capturing your initial ideas and input. This avoids the need to rethink the whole issue the next day.

But what about making decisions based on gut instinct? Our “gut” is based on valuable experience and connections that we may not be able to consciously articulate. Given this, we should pay attention to (or at least seriously consider) our first instinct. Be aware, however, of assumptions and hidden biases, which can heavily influence our intuition. For more on this, check out Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2007) by Malcolm Gladwell.