4 Key Steps To Strengthen Your Decisive Insights In The Workplace.
Having a decisive insight is, for lack of a better term, making an educated guess as to how a situation will pan out. How does this pertain to your workplace? Each and every day, employees, of every level, are tasked with making primary and important deductions about situations. Generally, this is a constant in life as a whole.
Whenever I think of what decisive insights are, I come back to an experience I had a few years ago while I was in Sales. I was with a client, going over the product information and looking through all of the options that we had to offer.
Typically, I had found it important to let the client sift through everything, give details along the way, listen to their needs, and from there, once they go through all of the options, go back to the one that pertains the most. But in this one instance, I chose to go against my “usual” model.
After the client had seen only three products, I knew that one had caught the client’s attention and I assessed if it was necessary to continue on when the focus could be directed to what they were already interested in. I did so, focused exclusively on that product and in turn made the sale. But what a risk.
I’m not alone in making these day to day decisions that one has to assess. But that is where your decisive insights come into play.
Here’s a list of 4 important steps to aid in the development of your decisive insights so that you can go on to make the sale, or address conflict with a direct report, or change the direction of your presentation etc.
1. Trust your instincts and listen
Sometimes when you’re faced with a decision to make, the best way to attain the path is to step back and observe clients and/or employees and listen to what they are saying verbally and/or as well as physically.
This can be key in having a decisive insight about how to proceed. Don’t jump to conclusions right away, but instead be creative and/or be open to multiple solutions/scenarios that could work. There could be more than one solution to get the result that you want.
2. Know when to take action
After you complete the risk assessment of all of the possible outcomes that can transpire from your choice of action, you can then further draw inference about when is the time to push for results, or when to wait out a situation and proceed with an action at a later time.
This analyzing may happen through long-term processing or via a quick-fire judgment call, but either way, the same steps need to be taken in order to finalize your concluded action. This deduction process involves weighing your options and concluding which one makes you feel more comfortable.
3. Defend your choices
While you’re deciding which course of action to take, you must line up your list of justifications and rationale behind why you are making a definitive decisive insight pertaining to the course of action that you plan to follow. Would you feel comfortable defending your eventual choice to your workplace superior?
If not, maybe that course of action isn’t the correct choice. With that being said, ensure you’re confident in your choices. Your experiences and training led you to have the conclusions that you have made. You were chosen to work there based on your past credentials. Consequentially, your superiors know that you have the needed insights to take action.
4. Hone your skills
The only way to continually be successful in your choices is to practice the art of making decisive insights. Whenever you are somewhere (be it home, at the mall, with a new hire, in a meeting etc.) practice reading a situation.
On an ongoing basis, thoroughly observe your surroundings and get the sense of what is happening amongst others or what other’s internal dialogue could be. As you practice these first steps, then visualize and rehearse, in your mind’s eye, multiple scenarios and outcomes. Eventually you will be so skilled, these practices will be automatic and instantaneous.
While most people naturally have the skillset to make decisive insights, when you want to apply it in the workplace, it really is best to put some practice into it so that you are more eloquent and so that you can be a top performer based on the decisive insights that you make. A practiced skill is always one that you can draw on and one that can be used on future resumes.
