Feelings: The Overlooked Factor in Business Decisions

In this enlightening episode, Pete Mohr delves into the often underappreciated role of emotional intelligence in decision-making. You might find it tempting to focus solely on the hard facts and figures while making important decisions for your business. Pete, however, convinces us that feelings, biases, intuition, and personal values, just as much as rational thinking, play a critical part in shaping effective business choices.

Here are a few things Pete covers:

• The significance of aligning team values with your business purpose.
• Understanding and mitigating common cognitive biases in decision-making.
• The role of intuition in business decisions, especially when data is limited.
• The power of active listening in decision-making and building a culture of trust.
• Empathy's role in validating stakeholder emotions and experiences.

It’s time to take action:
After listening to this podcast, it's time to reflect on your own decision-making process. How much importance do you give to emotional intelligence? Start by fostering an environment that encourages open communication, empathetic understanding, and active listening. Moreover, acknowledge the cognitive biases that might exist in your decision-making and strive to mitigate them.

Click to download your copy of the Decision Activator Worksheet.

Are you looking to make some changes in your business and your life in 2024?  Head over to speaktopete.com and book a chat with me to see if we're the right fit!

Transcript

Pete Mohr: 0:35

What's the most important thing you do as a leader of your business? Well, you make decisions, and it's all about the steady progression of moving from operator to owner in your business. Ultimately, decisions should be made at the lowest possible level of your organisation. And if you're making all of the decisions, you've got some work to do. And in this six part series, we'll go through the five F's of better decision making, the framework will help get the craziness out of your head and onto paper so that you can reduce procrastination and advance the ideas you have even faster to download a PDF copy of decide already the five apps of decision making, as well as a downloadable worksheet on the subject so that you can make faster and better decisions in your life and business. Slide on Over to simplifying entrepreneurship.com five apps, that's simplifying entrepreneurship.com forward slash number five, the letter F and the letter S, just aside already, which I'm loving this little series on better decision making today. It's the fourth F, all around the feelings, right? It's the emotional intelligence of decision making. And in this episode, we're going to explore a little bit around feelings, while the first three F's focus on objective factors, like the future impacts, the facts and the figures. The feelings component really acknowledges the importance of emotional intelligence and the subjective factors of decision making. It's important, and it's one of the biggest hold backs on making decisions, right. So we're going to discuss the roles of values and biases and intuition and decision making. Because it's real, as much as we have the facts as much as we have the figures, these sorts of things, the feelings around the decision, the people involved are often what make us procrastinate, have us have excuses for not moving ahead all of these different things. But the role of values and biases and intuition and decision making is really quite crucial. And let's kick it off with a little bit around the personal values. And, you know, from the five Ps formula, if you've been listening to me for a while, it's all around the alignment. And when you really have people on your team that are fully aligned with your promise, they're probably aligned with the values of your business to write. But if they aren't, here's where we can get into some problems, right? The personal values, you want your personal values and those of your teams to be somewhat or mostly aligned with, of course, what your promise is for your business and your values of the beliefs and principles that guide your actions and decisions, right? Aligning the choices with your values really ensures that your decisions are not only rational, but also resonate with a sense of integrity and purpose. And if that sense of integrity and purpose for the individual is not the same as for the purpose of the business. There's a disconnect there, right? So we need to take time and reflect and understand that everybody involved in this decision needs to be in alignment with the purpose of the decision and moving ahead so that their values are in alignment. And, you know, the next piece is the biases. Because we all have biases that can influence our decision making. And most often, it seems to happen unconsciously recognising and acknowledging some of these is just such a crucial step, not only acknowledging them for yourself, but acknowledging them within the team that's helping you make the decision. And I don't want to get too into the weeds here. But there's a few different types of biases that I think are important to bring up. And the first one really is the confirmation bias. And it's really where you're seeking information that confirms our beliefs. And next one is the anchoring bias, which when you're relying too heavily on the first piece of information that we encounter, whether that's the facts or the figures, we're fully relying on that, that's anchoring, right. The sunk cost fallacy is another one where it's like, Hey, we've already put this much money into it, we can't let it go now. But being aware of these different biases, you can really work to mitigate their influence and to make decisions that are better aligned with the best interests of the business and the promise right as we take our customers from that place, where they don't want to be with our proven process of whatever it is we do, and move them to a better life because everybody buys a better life, right? But understanding those biases really is going to help you and help your team make the best decision. Intuition is that gut feel and we talked a little bit about gut feel in the past episodes as well. But you do need a certain amount of gut feel around these sorts of things because that goes back to your wisdom and your innate knowledge around what it is that you're trying to do here and developing your intuition and learning Due to trust your gut can really help you make these better decisions, especially in situations where data and analysis might be limited. As much as we want those facts, we want those figures in the last two F's. Sometimes we just don't have maybe as much as we would like. So what are you going to do, you're probably going to trust your wisdom and your sort of innate knowledge that you have within yourself as the primary decision maker and within your team, right? The feelings we can take back to the five P's right, the five P's, understanding your promise aligning your product, your process your people, in order to have the right amount of profit, the five F's overlays that in this particular one with a feeling, it's all around that fourth P, the people, right, your ideal client, your ideal teammates, and your the other suppliers that help you deliver your promise. And part of that is active listening. You have to as the leader, you have to make an active effort, right? to genuinely listen and understand the concerns of all of those people involved in this decision. They're your stakeholders, right? You have to listen, you can't just boil ahead. Because chances are, if you do, the best decision isn't going to be made. Ultimately, demonstrating active listening can really make the stakeholders feel more valued and respected. And I think that's the important you're empowering your team, right with open communication. It not only allows you to gather valuable input from them, but it also helps create a culture of trust and collaboration. And isn't that where the best decisions are made in a culture of trust and collaboration. Empathy is such a big part, you know, put yourself in the shoes of your stakeholders and try to understand their feelings and concerns and perspectives. Because when you empathise with them, you can make the decision more likely to resonate with them. Empathy and authority, right, those are two key pieces. As we move the ball ahead to make a better decision. He needs to demonstrate empathy for all of those people involved in the decision. It really involves recognising and validating the emotions and experience of others, even if you don't agree with their perspective, just hear them out, right? By demonstrating the empathy you can really build stronger relationships and foster a more compassionate and understanding work environment. And that's what we're trying to do here. Because especially if we're making decisions that involve several people, because we need to balance the perspectives of it all. It's really the idea around considering the stakeholders opinions and feelings, to balance the perspective with the facts and figures, right and the future. So we take those first three F's, and we're bouncing them here and striving to strike the right balance between the emotional intelligence and the decision making process. In any sort of feedback mechanism or any sort of feedback talks, we always have to deal with conflicting opinions. And it's just natural to encounter a variety of conflicting opinions. It's healthy, right? And when you have that trust, and you have that belief, and the values are in alignment, people are okay with conflict, right? And you're working through focusing on finding the common ground and understanding the concerns for each of them. By integrating the feelings part of the decision making process and taking stakeholders opinions and perspectives into account, you can really make more informed and well rounded choices that better serve your business and its stakeholders. Isn't that what we're trying to do with decisions? It's decide already, right? It is hard to make decisions when there's feelings involved. But we still need to push through. And we still need to work through the final f of the package here too, which is the feedback because if people's feelings are hurt, and if they don't feel trusted, and they don't feel as though they're truly empowered to help make the decision, the feedback isn't going to be as good and that's what the next episode will be all about. It's around the feedback of the decision. So think about all these different pieces. I know I've talked a lot about variety of different emotional intelligence things here today, but which one do you want to improve to make even better decisions within your business? Think about the feelings and go and make it a great day.

Unknown: 9:56

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