Profiles of managers and coaches competent in decision making processes

Managers and coaches who are adept at decision making exhibit the following skills:

• They are able to analyze a lot of information in short periods of time
• They possess excellent analytical and strategic skills
• They are very confident
• They have little concern for the consequences of their decisions
• They show low levels of self-criticism and are quick to make decisions
• They are not afraid to challenge the thoughts and opinions of others
• They know how to recognize mistakes early on and deal with them quickly
• They have very clear and specific ideas about many areas of their lives

They are, on the whole, autonomous and independent individuals who can quickly get to the heart of an issue, ask without fear, gather information, process it, integrate it with their own beliefs, and, immediately afterwards, communicate it to their direct interlocutors. They mostly reason about how things must be today and almost never regret the past or rethink how the present could have been different if…

It may emerge from interviewing these people that:

• When asked about their careers they habitually do not criticize others for what has happened to them. In other words, they want to take responsibility for the decisions they make, and conversely do not make them dependent on others
• Quickly on an issue they know how to take a position and are able to identify the critical variables that led them to make that decision
• When providing an answer they do not use terms such as “if, unless, sometimes, may be” and so on. In other words, they take a position and support it until other data intervene to change the picture
• When you ask the same question to individuals who are slow to decide, they will bring up many ifs and buts instead of directly pursuing a solution.

The Achilles’ heel of managers and coaches who decide quickly is that sooner or later they will make a mistake. This is more likely to happen when an extreme level of self-confidence, prevents them from predicting mistakes, because they feed on the belief that they will not make a mistake, and when they make risky decisions quickly without the need to do so.