Emotions play a role in most (and perhaps all) decisions.
In fact, research has found that people can’t make decisions without emotions.
People that have had brain trauma affecting their ability to have emotions have a difficult time making decisions and some can’t make decisions at all, even seemingly basic decisions.
So decisions are always emotional, but what we’re going to talk about in this post is letting emotions run wild.
You know what I’m talking about: the times you make a decision when emotions are running wild and you regret the decision later. You look back thinking that you could have made the right choice if only you had time to let your emotions settle even a little bit.
Let’s look at the steps to take high emotion out of important business decisions.
Step 1. Create Guiding Principles
I went to a talk earlier this week where the founder of a major company talked about how important guiding principles were for his company.
The company was Seattle’s Best Coffee. He’s not involved anymore and actually spoke about a time before the company had its current name.
The company operated several locations, but he wanted to empower every work to make the best decisions possible.
They decided to create guiding principles and hang them in every location for all employees to see.
This way if a worker was presented with a decision they could refer to the guiding principles and ask themselves:
What decision fits within the guiding principles?
Seems simple, right?
It really is once you have the principles in place.
We’ll go with a basic principle: The Golden Rule.
A customer walks in and accidentally spills their coffee. They feel bad about it. They offer to buy a new cup at full price. The employee sees this and feels bad; the employee knows they would feel bad themselves if they had been in the customer’s shoes.
So the employee offers to provide the second cup at a discount.
That’s a relatively big decision. You don’t want employees making decisions like that without guidance. But the trouble with guidance is that not all situations have happened before.
Guiding principles allow your team (and you!) to make decisions for just about any situation. You and your team simply ask:
What decisions fits best with the guiding principles?
Step 2. Create Your Company Vision
Next up comes the Company Vision.
This vision is another simple aspect of running a company, but it’s not as easy as just doing it. Well, it really can be that easy, but entrepreneurs, at least some or even many, struggle to perform the exercise.
I think it’s in our nature to be weary or even afraid of the unknown. And thinking about the future of our business is an unknown. So there is an element of fear that goes into thinking about what we want our business to become.
It takes us out of our comfort zone of the ways things are now. We work each day doing what we’ve been doing, maybe changing things a little bit and if the company grows it grows.
Create a vision for you company. It usually begins with a number.
What do you want your company to make annually?
It’s a simple question, but have you ever really thought about it?
Start with the number. You don’t need to know the exact details of how to get there. Pick the number and you can work backward from there to figure out the road map for getting there.
But you have to start with the number.
Most entrepreneurs don’t start with the number. Again, it’s a little out of fear. Big numbers are scary. We get comfortable doing what we’re doing and don’t want to think about the unknown.
Begin creating your company vision and finish it. Once the vision is complete, or at least a general concept, you can use it to guide your decisions. You can look at each choice you have and think:
What option gets us closer to our vision?
Conclusion
That’s it.
Two steps to help you make better decisions.
Emotion will always be part of the decisions you make in life. It has to be that way. What you’re looking to avoid is decisions that you regret later. Usually those are during high emotion times when you’re not paying attention to your gut, which is often built on experience.
When you build-in long-term thinking into your company and into yourself you’ll allow guidelines to take away some of the emotion from the situations.
And the more decisions you make using your guiding principles and company vision the more it will become natural to make decisions that way. Your subconscious will start to come into play and you’ll make better decisions out of habit.
That’s the ultimate situation.
And you can achieve it.
