How to approach your toughest decisions

Every manager makes tough decisions – that’s part of the job. And the toughest decisions come in grey areas – situations where, even though you and your team have put in a lot of effort to gather all the facts, and do the best analysis possible, you still don’t know what to do.

It’s easy to be paralyzed in the face of such challenges. Yet, as a manager, you need to make a decision and move forward. This is when your judgment becomes crucial.
The notion of judgment is difficult to define. It is a fusion of your thoughts, feelings, experience, imagination, and character. But five practical questions can increase your chances of making a sound judgment, even when the data is incomplete or unclear, opinions are divided, and the answers are far from obvious.
Where do these questions come from? They have emerged over the centuries, across many different cultures, as men and women with important responsibilities grappled with difficult problems. They reflect the ideas of the most penetrating minds and the most compassionate souls in human history. I’ve relied on them for years, teaching MBA candidates and advising executives, and I believe they can help you, your team, and your company navigate the grayest of gray areas.
This article lays out these five questions and illustrates them with a disguised case study, in which a manager must decide what action to take on an employee who is consistently underperforming and has failed to respond to suggestions for improvement. He deserves a bad grade, or even dismissal, but the members of the company’s management are in favour of turning a blind eye to his failures.
How will the manager approach this situation? Not by listening to his instincts. Not by simply bowing down. Instead, it needs to work systematically on the following five issues:
1- What are the net-net consequences of each of my options?
2- What are my fundamental obligations?
3- What can work in the world as it is?
4- Who are we?
5- What can I assume?
To address these issues, you need to be able to rely on the most reliable information and expertise available. But in the end, it is up to you to provide answers. With gray area decisions, you can never be certain that you made the right choice. But by following this process, you’ll know that you’ve worked on the problem appropriately, not only as a good manager, but also as a thoughtful human being.

1- What are the net-net consequences of each of my options?

The first question requires you to take a thorough and analytical look at each course of action available to you, as well as its real human consequences. Problems of grey areas are rarely solved thanks to the luminous intuition of a single person. As one of the CEO having succeeded brilliantly: “The solitary leader on Olympus is really a bad model.” So your task is to set aside your initial assumption about what you should do, assemble a group of trusted advisors and experts, and ask them and yourself, “What can we do? And who will suffer or benefit, in the short and long term, from each option? »
Don’t confuse this with a cost-benefit analysis, and don’t just focus on what you can count or measure. Naturally, you need to have the best possible data and apply appropriate frameworks. But gray area issues require you to think broader, deeper, more concretely, more imaginatively, and more unbiased about the exact implications of your choices. To quote Mozi, an ancient Chinese philosopher: “It is the business of the benevolent man to seek to promote what is beneficial to the world and to eliminate what is harmful.”
In today’s complex, fluid, and interdependent world, none of us can predict the future with complete accuracy. And sometimes it’s hard to think clearly about grey area issues. The important thing is that you take the time to open your mind, put together the right team and analyze your options from a humanistic perspective. You can sketch out a rough decision tree by listing all the potential moves and all the likely outcomes, or you can designate certain people to play devil’s advocate to find flaws in your reasoning and prevent you from jumping to conclusions or succumbing to groupthink.
When you make important decisions, you affect the lives and livelihoods of many people. The first question requires you to take this reality head on.

2- What are my fundamental obligations?

We all have duties – as parents, children, citizens, employees. Managers also have duties towards shareholders and other stakeholders. But the second issue concerns something even broader: our duty to protect and respect the life, rights and dignity of our neighbours, men and women.
The world’s major religions – Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity – all emphasize this obligation. As contemporary ethicist Kwame Anthony Appiah states: “No local allegiance can ever justify forgetting that every human being has responsibilities to others.”
How can you accurately determine what these duties require you to do in a particular situation? By relying on what philosophers call your “moral imagination”. This means getting out of your comfort zone, becoming aware of your biases and blind spots, and putting yourself in the shoes of all stakeholders, especially the most vulnerable. How would you feel in their shoes? What would worry or scare you the most? How would you like to be treated? What would you think was fair? What rights would you think you had? What would seem detestable to you? You can speak directly to the people who will be affected by your decision. You can also ask a member of your team to play the role of the underdog or victim as convincingly as possible.
Again, you need to look beyond the economic criteria and the training you received at your business school. Of course, managers have a legal duty to serve their company, but it is a very broad duty that includes the well-being of employees, customers and the community in which they operate. You have real obligations to each of them simply because you are a human being. When you are faced with a gray area decision, you need to think – carefully, carefully, and personally – about which of these duties takes precedence.