Page 173 - Roy W. Rice - CEO Material How to Be a Leader in Any Organization-McGraw-Hill (2009)

154 • CEO Material: How to Be a Leader in Any Organization

you’re about by how you handle the setback, fix it, learn from it, and not
repeat it.
If you want to stay in a pool of high potentials, decide to decide,
sooner rather than later, and then rigorously debrief yourself about the
outcome.

Decisions are a bigger deal than the work of inspiring, vision,
selling, or leadership.
ƒ

Few decisions in business are life and death.
ƒ

Sometimes you have to close your eyes and say, “Okay, let’s go.”
Nothing happens without a decision being made. Others will make
them for you, or you can be the one making them. You make the change
you want. If you make the decisions, you just might get the results you
want. The only differentiation between you and others is who will step
up. If you freeze, you lose. Period.
Life is about making decisions. The question is how can two people
look at the same data and one get it right and the other not even get it close?
From judgment—making lots of decisions and learning from the experience.
The assistant to one of the CEOs I interviewed said of the execu-
tives who go in and out of her boss’s office: “Good ones are very decisive.
They know exactly what they’ll do and do it charmingly. They are never
wishy-washy. If wrong, they are the first to say maybe I didn’t make the
right decision, and they never point fingers. I can smell a good executive
and a bad one right off. The bad ones are not able to make a decision.
You need experience for making the right decision. Younger, immature
usually don’t have a clue.”
In any group of people, there are only a few who feel broadly ade-
quate to make decisions. Be one of those whether you have the respon-
sibility or not.
If you’re timid and fear “making a bone-headed move,” you decrease
others’ confidence in you. If you hold back, you let others make decisions
that you have to live with.
Pull the trigger: yes or no. You can’t half pull, can’t half lead.