The Essentials: Making Sound Decisions

LESLIE JOHN: Yeah, I had to chuckle when you said that I’m an expert in decision making. I am. Yes, this is what I study, but I am very indecisive.

AMY GALLO: Well, and actually I will just say I identify someone who’s indecisive too, and I understand you do as well, Tanya?

LESLIE JOHN: Oh, yeah. 100%.

AMY GALLO: Basically, three indecisive people trying to figure out how to make good decisions. This is the perfect setup. You’re listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I’m Amy Gallo. Tanya Sue Maestas is a dentist who has been directing a community clinic in New Mexico near the Mexican border for the last few years.

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: Working in the public health setting, patient finances are definitely at play. Oftentimes, we have to be a little bit creative and innovative with the procedures and the treatment that we deliver.

AMY GALLO: Tanya embraces the challenge. She also recognizes the care and skill required to make sensible decisions for her patients and staff. One aspect of decision making that she’s looking to get better at is how she analyzes the options and then communicates them. She also wants help with things like responding to pushback on a decision she’s made, particularly from the people she manages, trusting her gut and dealing with guilt and regret. We’ll cover those questions and more with Leslie John, a behavioral scientist and Harvard Business School professor.

LESLIE JOHN: First of all, in defensive indecisiveness, I do want to say there are positive qualities to it, and in fact, in my own job as a behavioral scientist…

AMY GALLO: Leslie studies how people make decisions and she knows which methods tend to improve the quality of those decisions and our satisfaction with them. Here’s our conversation. Tanya, tell me about a decision that you’ve had to make recently that was tough for you, and how did you make the final call on it?

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: I’m a dentist in a public health setting, and I manage a team of women, and we’re a great team, we provide care to the patients that we serve. But oftentimes, we can run into some issues, and some of those issues are teamwork issues, and I have the capability of being the leader over them, but I also have the possibility of bringing in our HR team to help us out to handle any disputes or challenges that we have. And so, recently I had to make the decision whether or not I wanted to bring in our HR team to come and help, or if I could handle it on my own. And that was difficult. As a new dentist, as somebody who’s trying to build in their own leadership skills, I didn’t know if I should try and handle it myself or if I should get some of the experts to help settle the situation. And so, I went with my gut and decided to reach out to our HR department to bring them in and help counsel out the problem that we were having. But I definitely toyed with that decision for a little bit.

AMY GALLO: You said, Tanya, that you sat with this decision for a little bit. And I’m curious in that, sitting with it, what were you doing? Were you weighing the pros and cons? Were you thinking about the risks? How were you noodling on the decision?

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: I was weighing the pros and cons. I was thinking about how I could handle it if I would be able to handle it myself, and what advantages there would be if the HR department came in and did try and help us with that, and what disadvantages would come with that as well, too? What personalities would get offended? Who would get hurt if we did have to escalate that to that point in bringing in our HR team?

AMY GALLO: Leslie, I listen to what Tanya’s talking about in terms of this decision, and I think about the way I make decisions, which is a mess, to be honest. I’m faced with a decision. I go back and forth – Well, maybe I should do this, maybe I shouldn’t. I think about my emotional response. Sometimes I seek outside help, sometimes I don’t. And then often, like Tanya in this situation, I go with my gut. Do you have any specific advice about that initial phase of contemplating a decision that could either give it structure or lead us down the right path in terms of making, ultimately, a sound decision that we feel comfortable with?

LESLIE JOHN: I think being a good decision maker, first and foremost entails knowing yourself. It entails knowing what you want, knowing what outcome you want, what kind of a professional climate are you seeking to have. So, that’s the really strong foundation, once you know that. And then you want to consider the options, and you may seek advice from others as to what these different options are, because when you’re in it, in your head, really cerebral, sometimes you forget, and so it can help to chat with trusted others as to what different options are. And then you want to evaluate the options and what is the best course of option. That’s a very broad framework that one can use. It’s certainly not, do you use it all the time? Do you use every step to the same degree? No, but I think in general, that’s a way that you may find helpful to think about decisions that are particularly difficult.

AMY GALLO: You’re reminding me what are my goals and values? That’s the beginning. And I think when we do feel emotional or stuck, it’s easy to forget that goal and just think, Well, how do I either get this over with? Especially thinking about Tanya’s decision about whether to bring in HR. I imagine you’re like, well, this needs to be addressed soon. And maybe there’s some element of, I don’t want to address it, or I don’t feel equipped to address it, or will HR do the right thing? But then to say, “Well, ultimately what’s my goal?” Then, “What are my options?” And then maybe seeking counsel and what those options are, and then which of these options do I need to go with based on the pros and cons of each does. It sounded a little bit like you used that method. Is that right, Tanya?

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: Yeah, I would say so. Something that comes to mind is in addition to indecisiveness is that I try and avoid conflict.

LESLIE JOHN: Me too.

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: But there’s a lot of conflict. That’s just part of life and part of working in a team, and so I think that that decision making ultimately led me to go the route that I went, having that third party come in.

AMY GALLO: Well, that’s that self-awareness again, is knowing what you’re comfortable with, what you’re not. So, of your options, handling it yourself and knowing that you tend to be conflict averse, well, maybe you’re not best positioned to handle that conversation.

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: Very true.

AMY GALLO: One of the things that we didn’t discuss in that process, Leslie, is considering how the decision impacts not just yourself, but others. And Tanya, I imagine that many of the decisions you have to make are about the greater good. Any questions about how to make decisions that impact others or even an example of one you’ve made recently?

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: I think that we make a ton of decisions every day, and the delivery of decisions to patients can be a little bit difficult. Oftentimes, there can be multiple options for a patient that you can present and you know, want to give that patient the autonomy to make that decision on their own. You want to give them the pros and cons of what each individual option is, and hopefully help them get to a decision on their own. And oftentimes they’ll turn to you and they’ll say, “Well, what’s the best?” And what I think is best for them may not be something that they are financially able to afford. So, I struggle a ton with that. Sometimes I’ll tell them, “Well, you can try and do this, but you could also do this. And I think that I can often get jumbled myself as a dentist when I am delivering that information and those options to patients.

AMY GALLO: I like that example a lot because I have to say, as someone who’s not in the medical field, I like to think that there’s a right medical decision and that my provider knows that. But you’re right that there’s all these other factors of, Will my insurance cover it? Can I afford it? How will it impact my family? Does the provider want to do this treatment? So, I think that’s helpful to think about is that there’s rarely a right answer, that it’s just sort of complicated by so many factors that there’s all of this going on. Leslie, does that reflect what you see in your research about decision making?

LESLIE JOHN: And we rarely actually have the information we need to know if it was the right decision, because we don’t usually have the counterfactual of what would have happened had we chosen a different course of action. So, I think part of, especially for big decisions, part of the reason why we want to go through a process is because the fact that we have engaged in a process something thoughtful makes us then feel better about the outcome. We know, okay, I made the best decision I could have made given the information I had at the time. A great decision making process can lead to bad outcomes. A bad process can lead to good outcomes. We can get lucky. But I think on average, if we use a thoughtful process for these big decisions, some decisions we want to make effortlessly by gut, the kinds of things, we have a lot of professional experience over repeated decisions, those are very often very rapid decisions. But I think your point is a really valid one, which is that you can’t tell someone what to do in some cases because you’re not in their shoes, and there’s no one right answer. And the answer that is best for someone depends on who that someone is. And so, I think one of the things that can be helpful in this case, something that I use with my own students, is to ask them questions to help them, to guide them through the things that they should consider. So, ask what outcomes would you like? If I may ask, would your insurance, this is something that you may want to consider. For the more sensitive questions you don’t have to ask them directly, but you could say, “If I was in your shoes, then I would consider this.” Students that come to me, for example, with, “I don’t know which of two job offers to take. Should I take this job offer,” I think they come in wanting me to tell them whether they should take it or not. Of course, I’m not going to do that. I can’t do that, as in your situation. It wouldn’t be right for me to do that. But instead, I ask them questions about the different trade-offs they may face with different jobs, the different considerations, things they might not have thought of.

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: I think that as practitioners, all of us can do a better job at taking more time to ask more probing questions to allow the patient to share how they’re feeling.

Oftentimes, you can offer a patient an option that’s fixed versus removable, ventures, crowns, and bridges. And sometimes they’re like, “Well, what do I do?” And I’m like, “Well, do you want something that’s fixed or do you want something that’s removable?” And perhaps it’s not as simple as that. Perhaps asking more questions as to, Hey, will you be able to tolerate something that you have to take out every day? Do you want something that’s a little bit more fixed that you may have to clean around on a daily basis? I think that those questions may be a better way to effectively convey what the options are to patients and help them come to a decision on their own.

LESLIE JOHN: Agreed. And another handy tool might be to highlight the trade-offs between the options, because if you highlight the trade-offs, it helps people better understand the differences and make a good choice. Whereas if you just think of each option in isolation, say, “Oh, I don’t want all that pain.” Well, relative to what? And so, the trade-offs help you think in terms of what is most and least important to you, and that facilitates decision making.

AMY GALLO: We’re talking about coaching people to make decisions, but all of this for me is just about how do I coach myself. I’m like, Okay, that’s another step to add, is evaluate the trade-offs. This conversation’s also making me think about that decisions aren’t really about do X or Y. I know that was the setup when Tanya gave you example, but sometimes it’s about, Well, can I do X or Y? Or can I get halfway to X? Or can I do part of X and part of Y? Which is, for me, one of the harder parts. It’s like, wait, now there’s infinite options, which can make it even tougher.

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: That’s where I struggle.

LESLIE JOHN: Same. First of all, in defensive indecisiveness, it’s not all bad. I think being indecisive has some positive traits. It involves a lot of questioning, self-questioning, questioning of assumptions, and that can be a tool in decisions. Of course, when it’s in the extreme, it’s paralyzing. How do you cope? And I think one thing that is helpful is to narrow decisions down, and sometimes you can even outsource the narrowing of decisions. So, I view, for example, a travel agent. The role of a travel agent to me is to save me from myself, to narrow the options down, because if I am left to my own devices on the internet, I torture myself. I go through every single thing. There’s an in individual difference. So, that is a trait that people have, and you tend to be either one or the other, and which you are/ you’re either a maximizer or a satisficer. Maximizers, you know who you are, tend to look at every single option before making a choice. Satisficers tend to say, “Okay, is this good enough?” And go with it. And there are good and bad things about each, but a downside about a maximizer is similar to being indecisive, is it can be paralyzing, and you can waste time on things that don’t matter, so having someone to narrow your choices can help. And I should also say there have been studies on who’s happier a satisficer or maximizer, all else being equal, which is a huge all else, because there’s so much else that matters for happiness. But if you just look at this dimension, and it turns out satisficing is more conducive to happiness, which is interesting food for thought. So, I try to remind myself for that of that when I’m going through a gajillion different options that are quite similar.

AMY GALLO: Tanya, how do you identify?

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: As a maximizer? For sure.

LESLIE JOHN: Yeah. In defensive maximizers is, it’s achievement-oriented. I’m not saying that satisficers don’t achieve, and they’re not achievement-oriented, but a maximizer it, you’re prone to that, which is good in some ways.

AMY GALLO: My mom is definitely a satisficer. Is it satisficer? Am I saying that…

LESLIE JOHN: Satisfice.

AMY GALLO: Satisfice. Okay. So, that would be my mom, and I’m jealous of it. She’s like, “Good enough decision. Carry on.” I’m like, “What? That would take me a week. What are you doing?” But what I do notice is sometimes I’m like, “You spent what on what?” I’m like, “If you had spent 10 more minutes researching or considering your options, you might have gotten a better outcome.” And so, one of the big decisions I’m constantly having to make is whether to say yes or no to projects. As someone who runs my own business and someone who is a contractor with HBR, every day I have, Do you want to do this? Do you want to write this article? Do you want to do this podcast? Sometimes it feels like I spend too long contemplating that decision. But I do think, to your point, Leslie, is that the questioning helps me be more thoughtful. It also helps make a future decision more quickly because I’ve been through that process, especially when you’re making a repeat decision like that.

LESLIE JOHN: Totally. And I think part of being a good decision maker is recognizing the similarities and having a template. For example, when I have opportunities, I think of, Does this require me to miss bedtime? If it does, then it’s got to be something that I’m extremely excited about.

AMY GALLO: Your kids’ bedtime?

LESLIE JOHN: Yeah. It can also be helpful to have a guiding mission, in a way, that helps you decide, Should I do this podcast or not, in your case. A friend of mine, Cassie Mogilner, she’s a brilliant prof at UCLA. She just wrote a book called Happier Hour, and her mission statement is something like, “To enhance and disseminate our understanding of happiness.” She studies happiness and she finds that really helpful because there’s a lot of asks you get, and students asking you to supervise a project, will you serve on this committee? And some of them are mandatory, but where you have a lot of leeway, she’s like, If I want to be a helpful person, I would say yes to everything. But if I go by, Okay, does this serve my mission? And that really helps to say no to things that are not in the service of that mission. It’s not easy though.

AMY GALLO: No. Do you have a personal mission, Tanya?

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: Yeah. I think my personal mission goes back to serving the underserved. For me, I feel that everyone, regardless of their means, should have access to dental care, and so I feel like that has become a personal mission of mine.

AMY GALLO: Yeah. Well, I want to contrast that with a decision that can be challenging to make of dental emergencies, when and how to treat someone who has an acute issue. So, if that’s your mission, how do you make those decisions in the moment? Can you tell us a little bit about how those decisions present themselves?

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: Yeah, that can be tough. We are very busy. We’re in an area where, you can travel a little bit ways out and you can find another dentist, but many people in this region don’t have transportation. So, we can get booked out pretty far out. We are booking way into the fall at this point in time. And we do welcome emergencies, but we are very clear that when an emergency comes in, they are seen in between our scheduled patients because we want to respect those who are scheduled. Oftentimes, they can get upset because they wait long hours. They might wait a whole morning to be seen, but oftentimes we can’t get to them. And the decision making there is whether or not we can see them, being cognizant of the timeframe of the day and knowing how many patients we’re going to see and what procedures are scheduled for the day, and adding an additional one where it can be an unknown. It can be as easy as looking in and being like, Okay, we can do this, and they can leave. Or it can be as difficult as you start an extraction, it becomes a difficult extraction, and your day and your hours they become awash, and everything just gets really, really crazy. But knowing that where my values and my mission is providing care to those who are underserved and those who need it.

AMY GALLO: So, do you tend to lean toward treating the emergency because of that mission, or how does that play?

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: We try when we can. I have to be cognizant of how our team feels as well too. If it has been a tough week and we have all just been grinding and are coming to the end of the week, and it’s been a really hard one, I have to be cognizant of how they’re feeling as well too, because we have lost staff due to burnout. But we try and see as many patients as we can. So, we do welcome emergencies as much as we can, or we ask them if they can go to another clinic, to go to another clinic or to return on another day. I think when deciding not to treat them and not to see them, the guilt that comes with it’s really, really difficult sometimes. I think that that’s really, really hard and people get upset it, and we have to set our own boundaries, but the people pleasing side of myself, that can be really, really tough for me to cope with. And so, that’s where I think I struggle most with making that decision. And knowing that even though it’s one more day, if a patient has a ton of pain, that’s one more day of pain that they have to deal with if they’re unable to go somewhere else.

LESLIE JOHN: Yeah, the guilt. Part of the way I deal with at least is seeing, Oh, the fact that I feel guilty, the things that I feel guilty about are things that I care a lot about. Same thing when I feel strong negative emotions, I try to think about it as this is communicating something to me. This is information. What can I learn from it? I also think though a way of dealing with guilt, this is something that I teach in class, focus on what you were able to accomplish, all the people you were able to help, which makes you realize you’re not just saying no to people, you’re helping people and you have real constraints.

AMY GALLO: I like the idea of saying, “Well, I was able to treat X patients today or X number of patients, or I was able to treat X number of emergencies this week. So, saying no to this one, while difficult in the scheme of things, is just a fraction of the work I did.” The other thing I think that might be helpful, and this just came to me, is thinking about when you’re saying no to a specific case, that also means you’re saying yes to other things, yes to other patients, not making your scheduled patients wait. And yes, I heard you talk about staff burnout. You’re also saying yes to your staff that I respect that you can’t work on every emergency that comes in. Let’s talk about the fallout of decisions a little bit more. Tanya, do you want to ask Leslie about how you handle resistance to a decision you make?

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: Yeah. I recently made a decision to change our booking system in the way that we’re bringing patients in for certain cases, and I have felt a lot of resistance from some of our team members. How do you handle the resistance that come from team members when you’re trying to implement a new workflow?

LESLIE JOHN: Can I ask a follow-up question? Why do you think you get resistance?

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: I think the resistance is coming from, it’s something new, and the previous workflow was something that was working. It wasn’t working well, but it was working.

LESLIE JOHN: So, one thing I think that can be helpful broadly, when you’re in a situation where you’re making a decision that impacts others and you’re worried that you may get pushback in its implementation, is to back up and involve them, the stakeholders, in the decision-making process. A downside is it’s probably more time consuming, and if you don’t take people’s suggestions, then that’s problematic too. So, there’s risks to it. But in terms of people’s openness to accept something, if you involve them in the process, you see a shift in their mindset. They become more problem solvers as opposed to critiquers. You could also try doing things like emphasizing to people what is not changed. Again, thinking about the way you communicate a decision, you can say, “We’re making some tweaks. Here are the changes, but here’s all the same.” The other thing that came to mind is pushback, and I don’t know if this is something that you’ve experienced, women, our decisions are critiqued more. We get more pushback than men, and that’s frustrating. And so, the example from my experiences is, especially when I was first new in this job, I was a rookie, and it’s a force curve so you have to give a certain percentage of the class a low grade, the lowest grade. And I remember chatting with my male colleagues of similar age around the time we were giving grades, and I was lamenting about all the meetings that I had. And in these meetings, students would be wanting me to substantiate the grade. And many of them were like, “What are you talking about? I don’t have meetings.” And so, anecdotally, it just felt like I was getting more pushback than they were, and it was super frustrating. And so, how do you deal with this? And I think credentializing yourself is important, but again, it’s a bit tricky with women because of these biases where if you’re very overt in credentializing yourself, there can be some negative consequences with respect to how people perceive you. Research suggests it’s more effective for women to adopt a little bit of a subtle approach in credentialing. So, if I’m teaching executives say, “I’m really excited to teach you because I’ve been teaching executives for 10 years here, and it’s one of my favorite things to teach.” So, it’s excitement and it’s positive, but it’s also conveying that you’re badass. And even subtle things, having your… So after, in my first year, these meetings, promptly, I put up my giant, it’s obnoxiously big, PhD diploma. I put it right in front of where the students sits. So, for you, making sure your credentials are hung very prominently, I would surmise it’s particularly helpful for women.

AMY GALLO: There are two other things that just occurred to me, one of which is that sometimes if you think about people’s change resistance, you can communicate a decision not as, This is how we will do things from now into the future forever, but say, “We’re going to experiment with this new system. It’s going to probably be bumpy for a little bit, and in a month we’ll evaluate how it goes.” Prose it as an experiment, as rather than a decision that’s in cement. The other piece is, Leslie, when you were talking about involving people in the decision, I have to say, my shoulder slumped, and I was like, “Oh, my God, that sounds like so much work. I’m sure Tanya just wants to make the decision, move on.” But the other idea that had came to me was, Could you involve one person in the staff who…

LESLIE JOHN: A representative.

AMY GALLO: Exactly. And perhaps someone who’s really respected by the others. So, if that person was involved in the decision, then they can help you communicate and be the person who advocates, “Yeah, this was a tough decision, but we’ve made the right one.” So, it’s not just you saying, “Here’s the new booking system. Sorry, it’s going to be painful. Go for it.”

LESLIE JOHN: I love that.

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: Yeah, I think that can be helpful. I think that that can prevent from the phrase, having too many cooks in the kitchen, just having a few of the team members, especially those who maybe are key players or have been there the longest and have seen trends.

AMY GALLO: And I think this example of the booking system really points to what is a good decision versus a bad decision? Getting pushback, does that indicate that you made a bad decision? So, Leslie, from your research, how do we actually assess the quality of the decision once we’ve made it?

LESLIE JOHN: I think this is where being upfront about what you hope to accomplish and setting some goals around that, even writing them down and then afterwards doing an after action review and thinking about, did you accomplish what you intended to accomplish? If you did, what do you think led to that? If you didn’t, why not? And thinking about it as something that you can learn from. I view decision making, as someone who is indecisive, as a lifelong learning process. And I think if you approach it in that way, you’ll be a little more forgiving when you make a decision that is not very good, that you’re unhappy with.

AMY GALLO: Tanya. Did the change to the booking system accomplish the goal you had hoped?

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: Yes. We’re seeing patients more promptly. There are still kinks in the process, but I think that we’re ironing it out as we go.

AMY GALLO: Well, there we go. Goal accomplished. That is a great way to evaluate the decision. That’s really helpful, Leslie.

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: So, Leslie, I have a question with regard to making peace with a decision, like hiring somebody that may or may not be the right decision to move forward with.

LESLIE JOHN: Are you comfortable revealing a little bit more about the nature of the problem?

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: Sure, yeah. During COVID, we were very short staffed and we needed to hire, and so we were at the point where we would bring anyone on. So, Leslie’s, my question is, will we survive?

LESLIE JOHN: So, am I understanding right that you’re really understaffed, you need to hire someone, and you’re not sure whether you hired someone that’s a good fit?

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: Correct.

AMY GALLO: Well, and also, let me just say what I hear in that too because I can relate, which is when you have to make a decision because of context, urgency, etc, and it’s not the best decision because you’ve had to make some trade-offs, how do you make peace with that?

LESLIE JOHN: Acceptance, understanding these situational constraints you’re facing, and being understanding towards yourself and also to that person. I also think it’s important to, once you have made the decision, to commit to it, because if you always feel hedgey about it, then that impedes you from moving forward and helping onboard the person, for example. It may even negatively shape the way you interpret their work. Whereas if you commit to it, you say, “I’ve hired this person, they’re going to be great, we’re going to work together,” then that kind of sets you up for success, even though it probably is not the first person that you would want to hire. There’s really interesting psychological research showing how commitment can really matter with satisfaction. So, I think our intuition is, Oh, it’s best to keep our doors open, keep our options open. But that’s not always true. Sometimes when we do that, we impede the important process that we undergo to develop relationships, to develop your employee in this case, to commit to them.

AMY GALLO: Well, to bring it back to Tanya’s example of, “I hired this person.” I can imagine just looking at them going, “Why did I hire them? Why did I hire them? Why?” In that case has not only negative consequences for you, Tanya, but then that person is 100% going to pick up on that, and likely the rest of the office is going to pick up on that. And so, you’re just making a tough decision you had to make with trade-offs a horrible decision as opposed to making the best of a decision that was tough, that involved trade-offs output. And I think even reminding yourself, If circumstances were different, if it wasn’t COVID, if I had seen some better candidates, I would’ve made a better decision or I would’ve made a different decision. This is the decision I’ve made, and carrying on, moving on.

LESLIE JOHN: And that’s also why in the decision-making process, thinking through your different options is helpful too, because when you think back afterwards, you’re like, Well, this was the best option available. It’s not what I would love, but it’s the best I could do.

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: So, Leslie, for a lot of dentists, especially new dentists who have just graduated, imposter syndrome is very real. So, my question is, how can you trust your gut knowing that you have the skills that you can do it?

LESLIE JOHN: So, the imposter syndrome, that feeling like you don’t belong, you don’t deserve to be, you’re not good enough.

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: Mm-hmm.

AMY GALLO: And this is the decision that will expose that. I can see. Going back to your booking system, Tanya, when you got pushback, you’re like, Now they’re going to see that I don’t know what I’m doing. I can totally imagine that.

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: Right. If it fails, they would be like, “See, we told you this wasn’t going to work.”

LESLIE JOHN: Yeah. I find even this is helpful because it exposes the irrationality in that. Really? Is one decision going to make people think that, but there’s some new and fascinating research by Bassima Tewfik at MIT on upsides of imposter syndrome. So, one of the things that emerge is that people that feel like imposters, they’re judged by their bosses to be more effective communicators and better at listening and getting other people’s input, and they’re perceived as better team players. And those are beneficial things, so I guess the first thing I would say is it actually can be a strength in some ways, but I know it’s uncomfortable. And I guess the other thing I would say is imposter syndrome does tend to lower over time, and I think that’s partly because you get more exposure that disproves this irrational belief that you’re going to be exposed. You make more decisions, and they do well, and you keep getting promoted so it’s, in a way, harder to maintain this belief.

AMY GALLO: I think of the research about what gut decisions really are, because they’re not just whimsical. We talk about them as if it’s like, my stomach is telling me what to do. But the reality is it’s that you have experience. You have expertise. When you’re deciding to change the booking system or you’re deciding whether to treat an emergency patient, it’s not about your emotions, it’s about the experience you’ve had. Even if you’re relatively new at this, you have expertise inside you.

LESLIE JOHN: Exactly. That’s exactly right. So, when you are expert in something, decisions, processes that used to be super effortful become automatic. And so, that’s what’s happening with the gut decisions. When you have a gut feel as an expert, it’s not whimsical, as Amy said, it’s a reflection of your expertise.

AMY GALLO: Well, and I think we alluded to this earlier, but the way to get better at decision making is to make decisions.

LESLIE JOHN: Yes. Practice makes perfect.

AMY GALLO: And so, I think one of the things instead of, Will I make a perfect decision here, is, Well, I will learn something from this, so let me make the decision and then get the learning.

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: That’s a good thought. I feel like sometimes whenever we have something that was difficult or a procedure that was difficult, I like to debrief with my assistant and tell them, “Man, this went well or this went bad,” and I think that through the conversation, it makes us both feel better about whatever that outcome was.

AMY GALLO: Absolutely. So, if one of the ways to get better at decisions is to make more of them, I think the more senior you get in an organization, you’re going to have that experience no matter what, and yet having to make more complicated decisions, make a higher quantity of decisions is exhausting. How can you prepare yourself to take on that more complex, greater decision making responsibility and maybe even build your stamina for making call after call?

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: And pushing through that in indecisiveness that you’re may already have.

AMY GALLO: Right. Because that pushing through the indecisiveness is also exhausting.

LESLIE JOHN: Yeah. There’s no easy answer to that. I think that as you go up, people who I think are really effective managers are also really effective delegators, so they understand, What are the decisions that are mission-critical that I need to make, and what are the ones that I can delegate? As you get more and more decisions facing you, you can’t do them all, and so delegation becomes more important, and when you delegate, you got to truly delegate and not micromanage, and accept the person’s decision. And that in turn, empowers your employees to feel more autonomous.

AMY GALLO: We do have an episode on delegation that could be helpful here.

LESLIE JOHN: And for those decisions that you can’t delegate, as you become more senior, there’s more decisions, they’re more important, you’re busier, and it could help to set deadlines. I think that the deadlines becomes increasingly important, and I think it also helps your… Part of, Amy, what you’re describing is the frazzled mind space, the Zeigarnik effect, it’s called, where unfinished tasks are very preoccupying. Unfinished tasks are preoccupying relative to finished tasks. So, translated to decision making, when it’s lingering in your mind, that’s when you feel particularly frazzled about it. But once you’ve decided, when you make a concrete decision, then it frees up your mind space to think about other things. So, making sure that you just make a decision, as hard as that is right, and accepting it may not be the best decision, but you’ve got a lot of decisions, you got to move on. Maybe that’s helpful.

AMY GALLO: I like that. I also sometimes try to remind myself, especially as a business owner who has to make a lot of decisions myself, that it’s a privilege to get to make as many decisions as I get to make. And trust me, there’s days where I’m like, I just wish someone else would make all the decisions. But if I step back out of that frazzled mindset, if I step back, it’s like, Wow, I’m lucky I get to make as many decisions about my career and about what I do every day. Tanya, what are you taking away from this conversation? Is there something you’re going to do differently going forward?

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: Yeah, I’m getting a lot of great advice, a lot of insight, and I’m glad that I’m not alone with my indecisiveness, but I think I’m going to work on that. I’m going to work on being more confident in my decision making, asking more probing questions to my patients, and learn to be more confident in the delegation that I give to my staff and my team members.

AMY GALLO: Involving them in more decisions.

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: Involving them, yes. Pulling them in and having more conversations with them as well.

AMY GALLO: That’s great. Well, Leslie, Tanya, thank you both. It’s been a pleasure talking about a topic that’s clearly hard for all of us, and I’m sure hard for a lot of our listeners too. So, thank you so much.

TANYA SUE MAESTAS: Thanks so much.

LESLIE JOHN: Thank you.

AMY GALLO: Women at Work’s editorial and production team is Amanda Kersey, Maureen Hoch, Tina Tobey Mack, Rob Eckhardt, Erica Truxler, Ian Fox, and Hannah Bates. Robin Moore composed this theme music. This episode is part of our series, The Essentials. In it, we bring together management experts and women working in essential industries in order to cover the fundamentals and nuances of key career skills. Scroll through the show’s feed to find other Essentials episodes. You’ll see ones on giving feedback, managing stress, retaining talent, and being productive. I also recommend our season two episode, Making Great Decisions, which gets more into how to work around double standards, like the one where people expect women to ask for their opinion and create consensus. And even when we do that, they’re still likely to consider us indecisive and lacking vision. Another reliable resource is the HBR Guide to Making Better Decisions, plus the many, many articles on hbr.org. I’ve actually written some of those, giving advice on making high stakes decisions and delivering bad news to your employees. If you want to go deeper on the topic of decision making and create a plan to practice what you’ve learned, check out Harvard ManageMentor. It’s an online self-directed learning and skill building resource. Visit hbr.org/harvardmanagementor to see all the different skills the program can help you build, broaden, and refresh. I’m Amy Gallo. Thanks for listening. Email us anytime at womenatwork@hbr.org.