In one of his most popular plays, Julius Caesar, Caesar (the Roman King), banishes one Publius Cimber from the empire for a crime that he (Cimber) had committed and though many of the king’s cohorts, including Brutus, who was hitherto Caeser’s right-hand man had pleaded with the king to pardon Cimber, the king remained steadfast, proclaiming that he was as ‘constant as the Northern Star’ and that Cimber’s sympathisers would rather ‘lift up Olympus’ (a dormant, holy mountain in Greece) than assume that he would rescind his decision.
Many times, people find making difficult decisions an arduous task. Decision-making, especially when the decisions to be made will impact people or events and cause change forever as a result, could be nerve-racking, nail-biting, bowel-moving, courage-draining and even terror-inspiring. However, there comes a time in everyone’s life when decisions must be made, when a leader should roll up his/her sleeves and make hard calls, especially in those situations where dithering in indecision might be detrimental to the well-being of an organisation.
For leaders to be comfortable confronting the anxieties that come with making tough decisions, they should understand that decision-making is a process. It should not be an impromptu act, an on-the-spur-of-the-moment impulse that could be corrosive and damaging if undertaken spontaneously. Leaders who are prone to anxiety in making tough decisions can therefore rest easy in the knowledge that understanding this process will help them smoothly over the challenge.
Firstly, they need to be aware of the problem, and the reason for making the decision. Once the problem is understood, it will need to be diagnosed. At this stage, they try to understand the root cause of the problem which if done well leads smoothly into the stage where they start to develop alternative solutions. This is the stage in which the different decisions that need to be made to address the problem show up. The alternatives will then need to be evaluated. Here they ‘test’ the impact of each alternative for their pros and cons. The alternative with the most cons is usually the one that saves the day. Finally, they need to implement and verify the decision. This is the point at which they actually make the decision. It is through this systematic process that good leaders make informed decisions that they can stand by.
Granted, some leaders go through the process faster than others because of experience and that makes them appear to make decisions ‘from the gut’. The truth though is that they all go through it in some form or the other and thanks to this process, there is never any need for a leader to procrastinate in the making of any decision, big or small, for doing so could put the organisation at unnecessary risk. In the armed forces, they say, ‘If you are in command, command!’”. It’s the same with leadership all over. If you are in charge, take charge! Be proactive, take initiative and follow your intuition in making a decision that you believe is right for you and for the common good, whether it will be perceived as wrong or bad.
Whichever way we look at it, we should understand that as a leader, how you make hard calls shapes your organisation’s decision-making culture over time and history will judge you and your legacy according to how you used your leadership skills to make and implement hard decisions. On the other hand, procrastination, for whatever reason, could make your future decision more complicated than if it had been addressed earlier. Always remember the saying, “Procrastination is opportunity’s natural assassin”.
Making the right decision at the right time means that whatever temporary pain you might face from making that tough call will seem tiny in comparison to the precedent you set that it’s important to put the organisation’s success first rather than succumbing to personal whims and ending up backing yourself into a corner where you have fewer options and hence look more incompetent than had you made the best decision possible with calculated decisiveness.
As such, just as Caesar illustrated, once a leader is convinced that the decision he/she is making is right and in the interest of all in the long run, he/she has no qualms about making it, irrespective of whether it might cause dissatisfaction to some along the way.