Your Awesomazing Decision Making

Greetings Decision maker,

For the grammarians out there, yes, awesomazing is a real word.

By now, you’ve assessed the dangerous judgment errors in your workplace with the Assessment on Avoiding Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace and hopefully started bringing this information to others in your organization. You’ve read through and reflected on the Wise Decision Makers Movement Manifesto, learning about the broader principles behind cognitive biases and the framework of how we can address them. You’ve also gained the 5 Questions technique to make "good enough" everyday decisions quickly.

What about making more important decisions than the everyday ones? Hiring a new employee, choosing a new supplier, selecting a speaker for your upcoming annual conference, deciding whether to apply for a higher-level position within your company: all of these and many more represent moderately important decisions. For such decisions that make a clear impact on your bottom line, using the brief 5 Questions technique to make a "good enough" choice isn’t good enough. You want to try to make the best decision possible using the eight-step decision-making model below.

Making the Best Decisions

Making new hires and other moderately important decisions won’t make or break your career or your organization. Still, getting them wrong will hurt you much more than making bad everyday decisions, while getting them right will be a clear boost to your bottom line. Because of the importance of such significant decisions, you want to invest the time and energy needed to make the best and most profitable decision, because it’s worth it to maximize your bottom line.

In such cases, use the eight-step decision-making technique, which I developed and tested with my consulting and coaching clients, called "Making the Best Decisions." It takes a minimum of 30 minutes if your initially-planned course of action is indeed correct, and longer if you need to revise things. If you do need to change things around, believe me, it will be very much worth it in time, money, and grief you save yourself down the road. I use this technique every time I need to make a new hire or take other moderately important decisions, and so do many of my consulting and coaching clients.

Here’s the blog on Making the Best Decisions:

What It Cost Me When I Made a Poor Hire

One of the reasons I developed this technique is my own experience making a bad decision on the significant matter of hiring a virtual assistant through Upwork.com. He said the right things during the interview and did fine during the on-boarding process. When he came on board, he was a little less productive than the other two virtual assistants I had at the time, but I figured he just needed to learn. He did improve. However, his performance slowly deteriorated over the next couple of months.

Eventually, I took a closer look at his work through the Work Diary feature of Upwork.com, which captures screenshots of his screen throughout the work day. That’s when I discovered that he spent a lot of his work time on personal activities, like browsing Facebook and eBay. I felt very disappointed and confronted him, but he denied doing anything wrong, so I fired him on the spot and left a bad review for him on Upwork.

He did not take it well. He took advantage of the (fortunately limited) access he had to the online documents and resources of my business to delete a bunch of files, leave negative reviews on a number of sites, and harass other virtual assistants. It took many, many hours of my time to clean up the mess, upgrade our security, and address the hit to team morale.

Yet the damage to our reputation in the marketplace proved even more costly. Sites wouldn’t take down reviews just because they were written by disgruntled employees who were clearly in the wrong. It took a lot of work and time for the nasty comments he wrote to stop appearing in the top listings of Google.

Investigating what went wrong with my hiring process afterward, I realized I was not screening candidates sufficiently for maturity and professionalism. I took a number of steps to change the hiring process to make sure that I limit the pool of candidates to those who are trustworthy. Doing so has saved me a lot of grief when considering candidates who looked good on paper and during interviews, but couldn’t show evidence of being trustworthy, such as through credible references, even though they claimed to have a solid employment history. More broadly, this episode provided a strong push for me to develop the "Making the Best Decision" technique, which I now use for every hire, and which many of my clients do as well.

What’s Up With Me

I’m starting to work on the publicity for the launch of my book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters, which will be officially published on November 1, and is ready for pre-order now (after you pre-order, make sure to claim your pre-order bonuses).

The initial press release is done, and my publicist is working on another one. We just finished our back-and-forth on the media interview questions and answers, so I’m ready for the wave of media outreach that will start around November 1st. If you know any podcasters, bloggers, radio or TV hosts, or other people with media venues, please let me know so that I can reach out to them.

I’m also starting to reconnect with existing media contacts and publishing initial pieces to pave the way for future publicity, for example this piece on effective negotiation in Inc. Magazine and this piece on entrepreneur decision making in The Secrets of Entrepreneurship.

Never Go With Your Gut Book Endorsement

Speaking of my forthcoming book, here is another endorsement for it, per my earlier promise to share some of the endorsements:

After 25 years of experience leading complex businesses including a Fortune 1000 company, with Adweek naming me as one of the most influential CEOs in marketing media and tech, I believe this book is a MUST-READ for any decision makers who want to reduce the risk of business failures! I have seen many leaders make terrible decisions because they followed the traditional advice of "listen to your gut." Gleb Tsipursky’s book explains in detail all cognitive distortions that affect the "gut" based decision making style. Gleb explores and explains pragmatic, effective, and research-based strategies to avoid the dangerous judgment errors that result from gut-based biases and lead to such business failures. His book is written in a casual and engaging style and is easy to read and it will help anyone be a much better decision maker. Get a copy for everyone in your organization!

Next Time in the Wise Decision Maker Guide

Next time in the Wise Decision Maker Guide - which hits your inbox every first and third Tuesday, so October 1 for the next one - you’ll get a technique to avoid disastrous decisions on the most critical issues. These are bet-the-company or bet-the-career choices, where you need a truly in-depth technique to compare often-complex choices with multiple variables.

Help Me Serve Your Needs

Did you ever make a bad decision on a significant matter, like hiring the wrong employee or making a bad career move? What happened and how did you deal with it?

Do you think that the Making the Best Decisions technique could have helped? How do you intend to remind yourself to use it?

Till next week, keep making those wise decisions, my friends!!

P.S. The broad public only gets access to my new book, Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters, on its official publication date, Nov 1. However, you as an awesomazing follower of my work get exclusive early access and can reap all the benefits!

Just pre-order the book on Amazon in any format, then enter your order information into this pre-order form, and you can read a digital version of the book right away! You'll also secure a spot for the November 7 live webinar discussion of Never Go With Your Gut that I'll be doing. Space is limited, because it's a Q&A format, so make sure to reserve your spot now by pre-ordering the book and completing the pre-order form. Hope to see you there!

Decisively Yours,

Gleb