WESTERN GOVERNORS UNIVERSITY
Developing Your Decision-Making Skills
Decision-Making Skills
The ability to make decisions is an important quality you'll need as a leader or entrepreneur in any field. It shows that you can think clearly and consider the outcomes of different choices. When you can make decisions quickly and effectively, it helps build trust with your colleagues and strengthens your company's culture.
Whether you want to advance your career, take on leadership responsibilities, or establish a solid decision-making reputation, you'll need decision-making skills.
This guide will explore the importance, benefits, and real-world applications of decision-making skills and practical steps to acquire and refine them.
What Are Decision-Making Skills?
Decision-making skills refer to the ability to analyze a situation, evaluate available options, and choose the best action. These skills are vital for making informed choices and tackling problems head-on.
Sharpening your decision-making abilities helps you navigate the challenges of the professional world.
Why Are Decision-Making Skills Important?
Decision-making skills are highly valued in the workplace. These skills enable you to identify and define problems, gather relevant information, evaluate options, and select the best action.
When you have effective decision-making skills, you can make informed choices that align with long-term organizational goals, leading to positive outcomes. Here are four things you can do with strong decision-making skills:
- Identify and define problems: Effective decision-making skills empower you to identify and define problems accurately. By understanding the root causes of issues, you can address them more efficiently, leading to better problem-solving and decision-making processes.
- Gather relevant information, evaluate options, and select the best course of action: With strong decision-making skills, you’ll have the ability to gather and analyze pertinent information and evaluate various options. You can weigh each alternative's pros and cons, considering potential risks, benefits, and long-term implications, then select the best course of action that aligns with your organization’s objectives.
- Make informed decisions that align with long-term organizational goals: Decision-making involves considering the long-term impact of choices on an organization's success. With decision-making skills, you can make informed decisions that align with the broader strategic objectives of your company. Thinking strategically and considering the future will contributes to your career progression and growth opportunities.
- Foster confident and proactive decision-making: Strong decision-making skills instill confidence. You become more comfortable making decisions even in uncertain or high-pressure situations. This confidence allows you to take proactive action, seize opportunities, and navigate obstacles more easily.
What Are the Benefits of Having Decision-Making Skills?
Strong decision-making skills bring several benefits that can positively impact your professional development. When you can analyze situations, evaluate options, and make informed choices, you gain a competitive edge that opens doors to endless possibilities such as:
- Increased responsibility: With effective decision-making skills, you'll often be entrusted with increased responsibility. Your ability to make sound choices inspires confidence in your superiors, leading to opportunities for leadership roles and career progression.
- Contribute to personal growth: Developing decision-making skills requires continuous learning and improvement. As you sharpen these skills, you become more confident in your abilities, leading to personal growth and self-development. You gain a sense of accomplishment and become better equipped to handle complex career challenges.
- Increased self-motivation: You can make choices confidently and efficiently with effective decision-making skills. This sense of autonomy and control over your work boosts self-motivation, allowing you to take ownership of decisions and drive your professional success.
- Build a positive professional reputation: Being recognized as a reliable decision-maker in the workplace is invaluable. Your professional reputation improves when colleagues and superiors perceive you as someone who can analyze situations and make effective choices. A good professional reputation can open doors to new opportunities, collaborations, and advancement in your career.
Examples of Decision-Making Skills in the Workplace
Individuals possessing strong decision-making skills will always be regarded as valuable assets to current or future employers as these individuals can take timely actions in a fast-paced environment.
Besides making quick judgments and informed choices, your ability to make strong decisions will allow you to consider all available information, the company's resources and goals, and workable solutions. Here are some specific examples of how you can use decision-making skills in the workplace:
Prioritization
With strong decision-making skills, you can prioritize tasks and allocate resources effectively, ensuring that important projects and deadlines are met.
Hiring and Talent Acquisition
When making decisions about hiring and talent acquisition, you must assess candidates' qualifications, cultural fit, and whether they will contribute to the organization.
Conflict Resolution
Decision-making skills are crucial in resolving conflicts by objectively evaluating different perspectives and choosing the best approach to achieve a positive resolution.
Crisis Management
With strong decision-making skills, you can navigate through uncertainties, analyze available options, and make critical choices to mitigate risks and ensure the organization's continuity during times of crisis.
Evaluate Projects
Decision-making skills enable you to evaluate projects by considering feasibility, profitability, and alignment with organizational objectives.
Organizational Decision-Making
If you're in a leadership role, you'll often make strategic decisions that impact the entire organization. Effective decision-making skills can help you assess risks, weigh alternatives, and choose the best strategies for long-term success.
How Can I Use Decision-Making Skills?
Making effective decisions is crucial for your personal and professional success. Strong decision-making skills enable you to navigate challenges, seize opportunities, and contribute to the growth and achievement of organizational objectives.
In healthcare settings you will use decision making skills in many ways.
- Healthcare and medicine: As a doctor, nurse, or healthcare administrator, you'll face critical decisions daily. You'll use decision-making skills to assess patient conditions, diagnose illnesses, and determine appropriate treatments, all while considering potential risks and benefits.
- Finance and investment: As a financial analyst or investment manager, you'll rely on decision-making skills to evaluate investment opportunities, assess risks, and allocate financial resources for optimal returns.
- Marketing and advertising: As a marketing manager, you'll often make choices regarding target audiences, campaign strategies, and budget allocations. Effective decision-making helps a marketing manager to achieve desired marketing outcomes and to drive business growth.
- Education and academic administration: As a teacher assistant or school administrator, you'll regularly make decisions that influence the learning environment and student outcomes. You'll determine the curriculum, allocate resources, and resolve student welfare issues such as mental health concerns, bullying and academic advancement issues.
- Project management: As a project manager, you'll oversee various aspects of projects, including defining objectives, allocating resources, and managing timelines. Effective decision-making will ensure that you execute and deliver a project successfully.
How Can I Learn Decision-Making Skills?
To acquire and sharpen your decision-making skills, you can enroll in one of the following degree programs at WGU’s Leavitt School of Health:
- M.S. Nursing Informatics M.S. Degree in Nursing Informatics (RN to MSN option)
- M.S. Degree in Nursing Informatics (RN to MSN option)
You will gain comprehensive knowledge and hands-on experience through our educational programs, and by the end of your course, you'll be able to:
- Complete a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) diagram for assessing choices.
- Articulate how personal beliefs and ideas influence decision-making.
Frequently Asked Questions
Decision-making skills are important in the workplace because they enable you to make informed choices, solve problems effectively, and align your decisions with long-term organizational goals.
During a job interview, you can demonstrate your decision-making skills by providing examples of situations where you made effective choices.
Explain the process you followed by including how you identified problems, gathered information, evaluated options, and ultimately made decisions that had a positive impact.
You can exercise decision-making skills without being in a high-stakes job situation. Decision-making skills develop when you are compelled to make more decisions.
To improve your decision-making skills, you can:
- Seek feedback and learn from past decisions.
- Enhance your critical thinking and analytical skills.
- Stay informed about industry trends and developments.
- Practice making decisions in different scenarios.
- Seek mentors or professionals with strong decision-making skills for guidance and advice.
Decision-making skills are highly valued in various industries, such as business, healthcare, finance, and technology. Leadership, management, strategic planning, and problem-solving roles often prioritize strong decision-making abilities.
Decision-making skills can be learned and developed with practice, training, and experience. By understanding the principles of effective decision-making and actively applying them in various scenarios, individuals can enhance their decision-making abilities over time.
With WGU, you can learn decision-making skills through our competency-based curriculum in a collaborative learning environment that gives you real-life application situations.
