Business Toolkit – Page 6 – thoughtLEADERS, LLC: Leadership Training for the Real World

Break Big Problems Into Small Problems

May 13, 2026/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Big problems can be easier to solve when you break them into smaller problems.

At one point, I worked with a financial services firm and we had a program where we were making offers to consumers. And when that program first launched, we were making about $5 million a year. The problem was, after a few months, we started losing $5 million a year. So this was a huge issue, and there were a lot of things that could contribute to it.

So we used the problem-solving process to get a better understanding of what issues were really driving the problem before we rushed off to solve it. We broke it down into what’s called a logic map. We looked at technology, we looked at training, we looked at systems, we looked at hiring, we looked at processes. Now, the good news is, once we broke the problem down, we identified the core issue, followed the rest of the problem-solving process and turned that program around from losing $5 million a year to actually making $20 million a year a few years after that.

So let me walk you through what a logic map is and how you can use it to breakdown your own problem solving. Let’s imagine we have a problem where profits are down. So, in the logic map, what we’re going to do is take profits and break it down into its component parts of revenue and cost. And by doing so, what we’ve done is taken a larger problem and broken it down smaller.

But those are still large issues to try and solve, so let’s use the logic map to break it down further. We’ll break revenues down into volume and price and further break down our volume into current customers and prospective customers. And by doing so, we’ve taken a really large item that we wouldn’t be able to solve easily and broken it down into smaller parts that are going to be much easier to figure out.

Now, you need to make your logic map complete. You can’t just stop there because we want to identify what all the possible issues are. So we need to look at the cost side of things. In terms of costs, maybe we’re buying more or we’re paying more for the things that we’re buying. And in terms of paying more, potentially that’s an issue where we’re getting fewer discounts or base prices have gone up. So, by breaking that logic map down and saying we had a profit issue, and really walking it all the way through the smaller and smaller components, the problem gets a lot easier to solve.

Now, there are multiple ways that you can break your logic maps down. It’s not always about revenues and costs. Sometimes you’ll break it down and it’s a sales problem. We have product A, B and C and that may be the first level of your logic map. Or you may break things in terms of short-term, medium-term and long-term challenges. There are going to be multiple ways that you can break your logic map down, and as it’s called, just break it down logically. Blow it out to a level where you can start seeing some of the smaller solutions emerge.

So, what I’d like you to do is take your personal problem, your personal challenge, take that pinned problem statement that you generated in the first step, and then generate a logic map that starts identifying what all the issues are that are contributing to your particular problem.

Want to learn more about solving business problems? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to solve business problems. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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What’s the most exciting part of your role as a leader?

May 7, 2026/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Leadership, Poll /by Trevor Jones

Our reader poll today asks: What’s the most exciting part of your role as a leader?

Helping a team member grow and reach the next level – 34%
Bringing the team together to accomplish a major goal – 36%
Guiding team members through challenging times – 13%
Setting strategy and direction for the organization – 14%
Something else – 3%

Goals and Growth. Most of you find helping team members grow and achieve team goals as the most satisfying and exciting elements of your role as a leader. It’s encouraging to see so many of you derive satisfaction from helping others achieve. Whether that achievement is of an individual nature like someone getting promoted or of a team nature like hitting your goals for the year, there’s something fulfilling about those achievements. The great thing about that mindset is once you get everyone on your team promoted, your leaders have no choice but to promote you as well and move you into roles of greater impact and responsibility. I had a great leader who taught me that the best way to get promoted is to get everyone that worked for me to the next level. By focusing deeper into your organization (rather than focusing on yourself) you’ll find your team members will push you up to your next level of achievement.

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

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You’re Always Being Watched: A Simple Truth Many People Miss

May 4, 2026/0 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Career, Communications, Guest Blogger, Leadership /by Trevor Jones

Your actions are always being watched. A leadership lesson on how small daily decisions shape trust, reputation, and future opportunities.

Today’s post is by Ryan A. Cherry, Colonel, USMC (Ret.), and author of READBACK: A Marine Aviator’s Manual For Navigating Life’s Hardest Lessons.

It’s easy to believe no one is paying attention, that you and your actions have faded into the background of daily life.

You go about your day, checking boxes, handling emails, moving from one task to the next. You assume that as long as nothing goes wrong, you’re doing just fine. Invisible, even.

Throughout my career, I learned that this assumption is completely wrong – both through my own experiences and by watching others.

Early in my career as a Marine aviator, I found myself in roles where I thought performance was judged only on the big moments. Flights. Missions. High-visibility tasks. I believed those were the moments that mattered most.

But that wasn’t true.

In reality, I was constantly being evaluated – long before I stepped up to the briefing podium or climbed into the cockpit.

My leaders were watching how I prepared. My peers were watching how I treated them. My subordinates were watching how I handled stress, frustration, and responsibility. What I thought were small, insignificant moments were actually shaping how people viewed me – and whether they trusted me.

The shift, my understanding, didn’t happen overnight. It came from a growing realization: opportunities weren’t random. They were quietly assigned based on patterns of behavior others observed every day.

Who gets the next leadership role?

Who is trusted with more responsibility?

Who is recommended for advancement?

Who will trust you in their most difficult moments?

It’s rarely decided in a single moment. It’s decided over time, by people watching more closely than you think.

And they’re not just watching what you do when things are going well.

They’re watching how you act when you’re frustrated. When you’re tired. When something doesn’t go your way. When no one is giving you direct credit.

Those moments define you, sometimes far more than the ones where you’re performing under a spotlight.

Your peers are watching to decide if they can rely on you. Not just professionally, but personally. Are you someone they trust when things get difficult? Are you someone they want on their team?

Your subordinates are watching to understand what kind of leader you are. Do you put the team first, or yourself? Do you take responsibility, or shift blame? Do you treat people with respect when there’s nothing to gain?

And your leaders are watching to answer one simple question: Can this person be trusted with more responsibility?

Here’s the part most people miss.

You don’t get to choose when you’re being evaluated.

You don’t get a warning before someone decides whether you’re ready for the next opportunity. There’s no announcement that says, “This moment matters.”

They all matter.

That doesn’t mean you need to live in fear of being watched. It means you should see it for what it really is – an opportunity.

Every interaction is a chance to build trust.

Every decision is a chance to reinforce your reputation.

Every small action is a vote for the kind of leader you are becoming.

The people who accelerate in any organization understand this. They don’t wait for big moments to perform. They treat the routine, the mundane, and the unnoticed tasks with the same level of discipline and professionalism as the high-stakes ones.

Because they know something others don’t.

Consistency is what people remember.

Not perfection. Not one standout performance. But a steady pattern of doing the right thing, at the right time, for the right reasons.

If you want to apply this immediately, start with one simple shift.

Assume that everything you do is being observed – and more importantly, interpreted.

Before you act, ask yourself:

If someone used this moment as an example of who I am, would I be proud of it?

That question has a way of sharpening your decisions.

It changes how you respond to frustration.

It changes how you treat people when there’s no upside.

It changes how seriously you take the small things.

And over time, it changes how others see you.

Because whether you realize it or not, you are already being watched.

The only question is what they’re learning from you.

Ryan A. Cherry, USMC (Ret.) is author of READBACK: A Marine Aviator’s Manual For Navigating Life’s Hardest Lessons. He is an executive coach, speaker, and is widely known for building and mentoring high-performing teams. For more information, please visit RyanACherry.com.

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If a team member isn’t happy with their career trajectory and opportunities, how do you prefer they handle it?

April 30, 2026/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Leadership, Poll /by Trevor Jones

Our reader poll today asks: If a team member isn’t happy with their career trajectory and opportunities, how do you prefer they handle it?

Come directly to you for a face-to-face discussion – 79%
Go to HR or a mentor for a discussion – 9%
Send you an email laying out their case for you to consider – 6%
Seek better opportunities on their own – 5%
Stay quiet and just do their job – 2%

Talk to a manager. There’s obviously a strong preference among respondents that team members come directly to them for a conversation when the individual is unhappy with their career trajectory or opportunities. These can be uncomfortable situations and, as a leader, your role is to make sure people know they can and should come to you. You also need to make it a comfortable discussion. As soon as you say “well, that’s just the way it is” that person will never come to you again, nor will their colleagues. Be inquisitive. Seek to understand their source of frustration, their hopes and expectations, and what they want for their career. You might be able to guide them to non-traditional or interesting opportunities they (and you) hadn’t considered before. To make this process even easier, try proactively reaching out to your team members to have these discussions. That can remove the fear they might have of coming to you directly and it could put you in a more open mindset to consider opportunities for them.

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

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Define Your Problem to Solve Your Problem

April 29, 2026/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

The first step of the problem solving process is defining your problem.

The first step of the problem solving process is penning the problem and this is where you’re going to come up with a really robust problem definition statement. You cannot skip this step. I’ve seen more problem solving go off the rails because people think, “Oh we know what the problem is.” They answer a couple quick questions and they immediately rush into the solution. You’re going to get in trouble if you do that.

So in the exercise files that accompany the video, I want you to look at all of the questions and understand you have to answer all of the questions. This isn’t a pick and choose. There are about 18 questions here in four major sections. So those four sections are first answering focusing questions, what are the stakeholders, what are the goals, what are the metrics you’re going to use to determine if you’ve been successful in your problem solving.

Second is evaluating prior efforts, trying to get some insights from the last time we tried to solve this or solve something similar. So have we had similar problem solving efforts in the past? Who was involved in those efforts? Let’s learn from experience.

The third is deriving insights from new lenses, looking at the problem from different angles. So what’s the perspective of the CEO versus the frontline? What’s the 10,000 foot view versus the 50 foot view? We always come at problems from our own perspective. It’s your default, it’s the way you look at things. By looking at it through different lenses you might come up with a different set of solutions.

So let me offer an example in the one of looking through a different lens. As a manager, you may say, “Well this is a training issue, my people aren’t trained.” When you look at it as the CFO she may say, “Well it’s a budgeting issue, we haven’t budgeted the training dollars.” So by looking through those different lenses you may find different possible solutions for your problem.

And then lastly, understanding relevant causality. We don’t want to solve symptoms. You need to dial the problem back to understand what are the root causes and in terms of causality. If you solve the problem, you need to think forward in terms of what are some of the knock-on impacts. If we solve this problem with our products, are there competitive repercussions we need to think about?

As you go through this step of penning the problem, go through that exercise file. Answer every single one of these questions and document your answers because that’s going to give you a really nice well bounded problem statement that’s going to drive the rest of your problem solving.

Want to learn more about solving business problems? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to solve business problems. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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Be a Social-Media-Ready Leader

April 28, 2026/0 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Career, Communications, Guest Blogger, Social Media, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

You can’t control every post, every image shared, every story that someone decides to tell the masses. But there are steps you can take to help limit the risk of opening your phone to a notifications jumpscare.

Today’s post is by Melissa Swift, founder and CEO of Anthrome Insight, and author of Effective: How to Do Great Work in a Fast-Changing World.

Today, there are so many places where people can go to talk about their jobs, workplaces, employers, and bosses. From LinkedIn and Reddit to Instagram and TikTok to Glassdoor and Blind, there is no shortage of discussion of work on social media.

And much of it’s pretty negative – which can have a range of impacts from hurt feelings to people getting fired to companies actually losing value or failing. I remember vividly getting called out on a consulting platform for perceived sins around some employee engagement awards. The poster didn’t quite have their facts right, but they weren’t entirely wrong about some of the underlying issues, either. And I went from feeling a bit awkward already to feeling downright terrible. Who wants to be that person getting complained about as hordes of people watch?

So what’s a leader to do? (other than avoiding Coldplay concerts, of course)

You can’t control every post, every image shared, every story that someone decides to tell the masses. But there are steps you can take to help limit the risk of opening your phone to a notifications jumpscare. You don’t need to have a perfect profile or an immense following yourself, but you do want to protect your own professional image (and your company’s) from unwanted shocks. Let’s look at some ways to do so.

A good place to start is how you communicate and operate at work. A number of executives have recently highlighted to me the role of coherence – being consistent and logical in what you say and do. This is a fantastic example of something that’s “simple but not easy.” Every day, a million imperatives push us in a million directions. Even the most focused leaders can find themselves all over the map on a bad day.

But coherence is critical in a world of pervasive social media. Think about what triggers someone to post…so often, it’s frustration. And frustration is frequently triggered by a moment of “I just don’t get it” – someone’s words don’t make sense checked against their actions, or their words don’t make sense in relation to their other words, or their actions to their other actions. Or maybe it’s all just a hot mess from the point of view of someone not inside that leader’s head at that particular moment. In any of these scenarios, frustration can very easily turn into a public statement.

So coherence is your friend. To the extent that what you say and do makes sense with all of the other things you say and do, you avoid triggering the co-workers in your vicinity and limit the risk of being publicly shamed for a perceived inconsistency. You may not always have this perfectly under control – many organizations are incoherent beyond what any one leader can impact – but it’s a worthwhile guiding aspiration.

It’s not just what you do and say, though: it’s how you do and say it. Emotional appropriateness is another key ingredient in staying out of the social media hot seat. Simply put, as experts on emotion in the workplace like UVA’s Jim Detert will tell you, conveying a type of and level of emotion that matches the situation you’re in helps put others in the conversation at ease. This doesn’t mean always damping down emotion: if something terrific or something terrible is happening, and you display a fairly flat way of communicating, that can cause further emotional arousal in your audience…just as if you started yelling or crying during an unremarkable meeting. That emotional arousal looks for an outlet – which could be a sympathetic spouse or a social media post seen by millions. You can’t always count on it to be the former. Particularly in trying moments, like layoffs, emotional appropriateness is particularly critical. Think of the number of posts you’ve seen on executives conveying job losses robotically vs empathically; when a leader displays emotions that match the moment, there’s less pithy fodder for a 30 second takedown.

Finally, be smart and measured about your own social media presence. Consider private accounts for political or otherwise sensitive content, as you cannot reasonably know what your co-workers’ most deeply held beliefs are. Be scrupulous about placing content on the right platform – no one on LinkedIn wants to see your bathing suit photos! And when in doubt, less is more. A measured quantity of social media content is far less likely to set someone off – and get them responding in ways that are damaging to you – than a wildly unpruned garden of random thoughts.

Social media at work can feel absolutely impossible to navigate. It’s not completely uncontrollable though – and much of what you can do to manage it, such as being coherent and emotionally appropriate, pays huge dividends far from just the social media realm.

It’s a highly transparent world, but you can show it a leader worth seeing.

Melissa Swift is a leading voice on how organizations, teams, and individuals can succeed in an ever-more challenging world of work. As founder and CEO of Anthrome Insight, she is a practicing consultant and keynote speaker. She has held consulting leadership roles at Capgemini, Mercer, Korn Ferry, and Deloitte. She is also the author of Work Here Now: Think Like a Human and Build a Powerhouse Workplace (Wiley, 2023).

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How familiar are you with the day-to-day activities and responsibilities of your team members?

April 23, 2026/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Leadership, Poll /by Trevor Jones

Our reader poll today asks: How familiar are you with the day-to-day activities and responsibilities of your team members?

I’m intimately familiar – 17%
I’m very familiar – 62%
I’m somewhat familiar – 17%
I’m not very familiar – 3%
I’m not at all familiar – 1%

Know their roles. 79% of you report being very familiar with your team members’ daily activities – as you should be. The better you understand their challenges, the more effectively you can remove barriers and get them the resources they need. Knowing their responsibilities helps you avoid overloading them with too much work. Knowing their work also demonstrates you care about their experience on the job and helps you empathize with challenges they face. Sure, it takes time to get familiar with their work. That said, it’s quality time you get with them and time they get with you. It helps foster connection and build trust in a world increasingly dominated by remote work and electronic interactions. Get in touch and stay in touch with the work you’re asking them to do and, more importantly, the people you’re asking to do it.

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

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The Five-Step Business Problem-Solving Process

April 22, 2026/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Have you ever had a business problem that you’re not sure how to solve? This five step problem-solving process is a great place to start.

At one point, I worked with a financial services firm, and we had this really cool program that, when we first launched it, was doing really well, both from a customer standpoint and from a financial standpoint. The problem came up when, all of the sudden, the financial numbers started tanking, and everybody started freakin’ out. We didn’t know what was going on, and it was pretty important for me to solve it because it was a program I was responsible for. So given the complexity of that problem, I used the five-step problem-solving process, and the steps of the process are really simple and straightforward.

In the first step, you pin the problem. You define what the issue is, what the goals of the stakeholders are, what previous efforts looked like, and you come out of that first step with a really clear definition of what the problem is. You can’t just rush ahead into solving a problem if you don’t know what the issue is.

Next is identifying all the issues that could be contributing to that problem. A lot of times, at first glance, you may say that’s the issue, but you’ll find, if you go through the process from there, you’re really solving a symptom. So this step of creating a logic map helps you expand what all the possible issues are that are contributing to the problem from the first step, and what that’ll enable you to do is find the real root cause that you’re going to solve for.

The third step of the process is identifying your best guess. So once you have all those issues listed out, starting to identify small solutions that could solve each of those and then prioritizing your efforts because you don’t have time, I don’t have time to go out and chase every single one of these solutions. So this step is really about homing in on that’s the one solution that seems like it could be the biggest, and we’re going to chase that one first.

The fourth step of the process is taking that one idea, that one hypothesized answer, and then doing your analysis. If your organization is anything like the ones I’ve been part of, you need a lot of data and a lot of support to take these big ideas and prove your case. So this fourth step of the process is doing that analysis, getting that in-depth information to say yes, that’s really what’s causing this, and that is the size of the prize.

The fifth step of the problem-solving process is taking that answer, turning it into a recommendation, and pitching it to your stakeholders. You have to convince people that this is the right answer, and the resources I’m asking for to go out and solve it are resources you should give me because I’ve proven my case.

So with that financial services firm, we walked through that five-step problem-solving process. We found the root cause. We found what the issue really was, and it wasn’t what we initially thought, and we were able to prove that case with analysis, make the recommendation to our stakeholders, and make the required changes and financial performance turnaround, and everybody was happy with the result because we used that five-step process.

So as I go through this course, what I recommend is you pick a business problem you’re trying to solve. Pick something you haven’t been able to crack before, something that’s ambiguous and confusing, and then apply the five steps of the problem-solving process to your problem, and hopefully, on the back end, you’ll come out with a clear, concise recommendation that’s really going to be the solution.

Want to learn more about solving business problems? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to solve business problems. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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What best describes your organization’s approach to taking risks?

April 16, 2026/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Leadership, Poll /by Trevor Jones

Our reader poll today asks: What best describes your organization’s approach to taking risks?

We’re risk-seeking – 11%
We’re risk-tolerant – 50%
We’re risk-avoidant – 34%
We refuse to take risks – 5%

More risk than not. Over 60% of you report your organizations are risk tolerant or risk seeking. The other 40% avoid it or refuse to take risks. What’s important to understand is risk is about uncertainty and a lack of information. As we gather new information, risk goes down. Theoretically, we can spend a lot more time gathering more and more information. Unfortunately, that takes time and with every minute we spend gathering information, new sources of uncertainty enter the equation. Know when you have enough information to take a first step or initial action. Once you’ve taken that action, reassess and take another action. You don’t always have to make a single big move. Smaller incremental steps like pilot programs, tests, and reversible changes can accelerate your decision making, provide you new information, and reduce the amount of risk you’re taking. Remember – you’ll never have perfect information so act now, learn, and act again.

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

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Communicating, Executing, and Measuring Your Decisions

April 15, 2026/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Communications, Leadership, Strategy, Training /by Trevor Jones

As you prepare to execute your decisions, think through your communication plan, identify the sources of risk and how you’re going to mitigate them, and think through how you’re going to measure and adjust.

Once a decision has been made, it must be communicated, executed, and then you have to measure it. Additionally, you need to adjust once you get new information.

Communicating

In terms of communication, be sure to articulate what the decision was, who made the decision, and why the decision was made. Let the organization know the goal of the decision was to drive this metric. Also tell them, “Here’s how we’re going to measure the success of this decision.” And to the extent you’re able to, identify events or information that might lead you to reverse the decision you’ve already made. Put in place those trigger points to say, “We need to go back and rethink this thing.”

Executing

Second, think through execution and the risks that come along with it. Just because a decision has been made doesn’t mean it gets executed by the organization. Sometimes you’ll see passive aggressive behavior where people aren’t doing the work. Or it’s been a bad decision and we get new information, saying we should change course, or new events that we didn’t anticipate. Put that decision at risk.

Measuring

Last, you have to measure and adjust accordingly. Set clear metrics in place that tie back to the original goal of the decision. If we’re trying to make a decision that will grow our business, we may want to have a metric that says we’re going to evaluate sales growth, and you can see that direct linkage between the metric and the original goal. Also react to ambiguity and new information as you resolve that source of uncertainty. And be ready to change that decision as it becomes clear, an incorrect decision was made in the first place.

I know an example where a company was making a very large technology investment and the decision was made that we were going to implement this new software platform. About $2 million into the project, it started becoming clear that this may not have been the right decision, but the executive who made the call up front said, “Well, we have a deadline and we’ve already communicated we’re making this change, so go figure it out.”

And the only way to figure it out was to spend more money. So more money was spent. And at $5 million, it became clearer that we shouldn’t be doing this. At 10, it was very clear, but this executive said, “I’ve made my decision. We need to figure this out.” $25 million later, it became abundantly clear that this was absolutely the wrong decision. And yet that executive still wouldn’t make the call to reverse course.

Ultimately, the CEO stepped in and said, “We’ve made an incorrect decision. We need to write the project off, and we need to move down a different path.” It is critical to measure and adjust and be willing to say, “We made a bad decision in the first place, let’s make a different one.”

So as you prepare to execute your decisions, think through your communication plan, identify the sources of risk and how you’re going to mitigate them and think through how you’re going to measure as well as adjust if it becomes clear that that first decision wasn’t the best one.

Want to learn more about decision-making strategies? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning decision-making strategies. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

How well does your organization support people who have been injured at work?

April 9, 2026/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Leadership, Poll /by Trevor Jones

Our reader poll today asks: How well does your organization support people who have been injured at work?

Extremely well – 38%
Very well – 37%
Well – 11%
Not very well – 8%
Poorly – 6%

Taking care of people. Injuries happen. How you handle them is critical. Many of you report doing a great job of supporting employes who get hurt. People notice and remember that. It builds the dynamic of “this company cares about its people so I should care about the company.” That drives engagement, retention, and it’s also the right thing to do. For those of you in the lower performing groups, ask why the organization behaves that way and think about how you can change that dynamic. Can you make it easier for people to access benefits programs? Can you reduce the pressure to come back to work? Can you make accommodations to their job responsibilities? Think about how you’d like to be treated if you were injured and make those changes happen. Often, they don’t cost a lot of money – it’s just empathy, time, and effort. Also consider the cost of not doing it well. Those stories travel and sometimes hit national newswires. Can you really afford to not treat people well after they’ve been injured? Be a leader and drive these necessary changes.

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

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10 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Making a Big Decision

April 8, 2026/1 Comment/in Business Toolkit, Communications, Leadership, Strategy, Training /by Trevor Jones

Before you move forward and take that final action, make sure you pause, spend some time considering these questions, and document your answers so you can be sure to make the best decision possible.

As you get ready to make a decision and take action, there are some critical questions you need to ask yourself before you move forward. Take the time to think this stuff through. As you get ready to move forward, ask yourself:

How big is this decision?
Can I break that big decision into smaller ones to reduce the risk that I face?
How irrevocable is this decision?
Can you roll it back if you’re wrong, or is it you have to get it right on the first shot? You should know the difference.
What’s the cost of being wrong, and what’s the value of being right? And is that an appropriate trade-off that you’re making?
How long do you have to make the decision? Many times, we impose a deadline on ourselves which isn’t real. What’s the real deadline for making this call and moving forward? What’s the cost of waiting, and what’s the value of acting now? For example, I had a decision I had to make, and if we acted sooner, we would save a lot more money. And if we waited, those savings were going to be gone. Understanding that trade-off of time is critical.
What are my personal biases that might be affecting this decision? Perhaps in the past, you made a decision and it didn’t go well, and this decision feels a lot like that last decision that didn’t go so well. You should know that you have a bias that might be affecting your decision to move forward.
How do I mitigate the biases that I might have to make clearer decisions? Can you bring somebody in as a sounding board to help push you on those biases?
Who do I need to involve in the decision, and how do I need to involve them?
And lastly, who needs to know I made a decision, and how should I inform them? Some decisions, it’s fine to send out an email. Other decisions, that would be highly inappropriate. And you need to think through the communication plan for how you’re going to get the message out there.

So before you move forward and take that final action, make sure you pause, spend some time considering these questions, and document your answers so you can be sure to make the best decision possible.

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