Making Decisions

Every day you face situations that require decisions. Your decision making starts when you get up in the morning and doesn't end until you go to bed at night.

Some decisions are so simple or automatic that they seem to require no thought, such as when you pull to the side of the road because you hear an emergency vehicle's siren behind you or when you buy concert tickets early because you know the performance will sell out. Other decisions require time and a great deal of thought.

As you progress in your career, here are some typical decisions you may encounter:

• Should you take a non-paying internship to gain experience in your field?

• Should you take a lower-paying job with great potential or a higher-paying job with less opportunity to move up?

• Should you take a job out of the area if it means moving your family to another state or country?

In your daily work, you'll run into issues that require good decisions:

• Should you call an expensive computer technician in to fix a problem with your company computer when you could spend several hours and maybe--or maybe not--solve the problem yourself?

• Should you go over the budget on a project to do the best possible job or stay in budget and do an adequate, but not great, job?

• Should you risk losing a customer by referring her to a competitor who specializes in her problem or try to keep the customer, even though you know you're not the best person for the job?

• Should you turn down a good-paying project for your company if you believe you can't meet the deadline or should you take the project and try to work it in with all your other projects?

• Should you confront a bully who is picking on a new employee or let the employee work it out on his own?

How do good decision makers come up with the answers they need? To make the best decisions, you need to do these four things:

• Look at both sides of an issue

• Get as much information on the issue as possible

• Evaluate all the information

• Think about how the information should be used

To try decision making yourself, add some fictitious information to one of the situations above and apply the four guides to come up with the decision you believe is best.

Next week, Career Headlines will cover the 21st century skill of collaboration.