Executive Coaching for Better Decision Making: Eliminate Decision Failures

Are you working at a company or law firm where executive coaches help leaders make better decisions? Does your company or law firm provide executive training and leadership development for your best and brightest leaders?

One of the most powerful questions you can ask yourself is “How can I make better decisions?” Emotionally intelligent and socially intelligent organizations provide executive training and leadership development for exemplary leaders at all levels of the organization.

Decision making defects

Authors Sydney Finkelstein, Jo Whitehead, and Andrew Campbell have studied how smart leaders make catastrophic decisions. In Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Stop It from Happening to You (Harvard Business School Press, 2008), these experts show how the brain’s thought processes can distort judgment.

In studies of more than 83 flawed business and policy decisions, the authors identify two main factors at play:

1. An individual or a group has made an error in judgment.

2. A decision process does not correct the error.

Normally, when an influential person makes an error in judgment, the decision process will bring the error to light. Other people with different points of view will challenge the faulty thinking. Facts will be stated and erroneous opinions will be corrected.

Complex decisions always involve personal interpretations and judgments. That’s what makes them hard to hit. It needs debate and consensus, but even with both, two important questions arise:

1. How do you know when you or those who debate your premise are coming from a biased position?

2. How do you know when your consensus is just groupthink?

Working with an experienced executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments like the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help company leaders learn how to become better decision makers. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and social intelligence, and who inspires people to fully commit to the vision and mission of your company or law firm.