I’ve been trying to work with my kids on decisiveness. Making decisions quickly is a skill. And I get it, deciding on the perfect toy at Target when you have a $25 gift card burning a hole in your pocket is an important decision.
It matters in business too. More than people think. Make a call, move on. For most of us, it ain’t life or death.
As leaders, not only do we need to make decisions quickly, but we need to empower our teams to do the same. Throughout my career, I’ve been lucky enough to have leaders that believed in my ability to trust my gut and to make a call. Sometimes you need guardrails, other times budgets. But in the day to day, your team just needs to know you have their back.
A 2018 McKinsey survey of 1,200 global business leaders found that inefficient decision-making costs a typical Fortune 500 company 530,000 days of managers’ time each year, equivalent to about $250 million in annual wages. Your team may not be in the Fortune 500, but the bottleneck is the same.
It’s an epidemic that I think about often. So next time you’re weighing options, whether it’s at Target or in the board room, trust your gut and make a call.