Welcome to the last quarter of the year.

Now is a great time to look at how your slice of the organization’s business is progressing. Are you and your team on track to achieve your business goals? If you’re on schedule (or ahead of it), you’re likely to stick with the plan and keep doing what you’ve been doing.

But what if you’re behind? What’s going to change? The difficult part about this situation is that, even before you start doing something, you’ll have to decide what to do.

Time and again I hear that “making decisions” or “being decisive” is the most difficult aspect of being a sales manager or sales representative. Indeed, decision making is a worthy topic for us to discuss: 1) because it’s a critical time of review and reassessment and 2) because “being decisive” is more than “how can I make my team work harder?”

Why Is Decision Making So Difficult?

We can gain useful insight into this issue by looking at the origin of the word. It turns out that “decision” literally means to “cut off” or “to cut away” our options. So, by that definition, making a decision poses the potential to lose something. It’s difficult nature and uncomfortable feeling comes from people typically being risk averse. Maybe the way forward, then, is to be more rational.

Peter Drucker’s approach says that decisions should involve two simple filter questions:

• What needs to be done?

• What’s right for the business?

When making a decision, there should be a little voice inside your head asking questions like these. But when there’s pressure to be decisive this rationality may escape you simply because you’re dealing with other people and social issues are going to weigh heavily.

As rational thought reviews things objectively, your emotional voice is asking, “Is this decision going to make me look good or bad?” Unfortunately, your emotional voice often shouts louder, so we pay more attention to it.

What Research Says

Work done by professor of cognitive neuropsychiatry at the University of Sydney, Australia,  Lea Williams (also director of the Brain Dynamics Centre) found that as you get older and your brain ages (like good red wine), you become less neurotic AND have more emotional control. It’s this control that is vital for making good decisions when other people are involved.

The other aspect that comes into play is that, as you get older, you develop what many people call “wisdom.” Wisdom is made up of three parts: pattern recognition for thinking shortcuts, fluency, and emotional control for better decision making. Wisdom is helped along by your brain’s high-speed, myelinated white matter connections to what you know.

How does this play out in a real-life situation?

A great practical example of the interplay between decision making and wisdom is from a study into how U.S. Major League Baseball umpires make the nanosecond decision whether a pitch is a “strike” or a “ball” with such a great degree of certainty—especially when under such enormous social pressure.

The study showed there were three distinct types of umpire responses:

1. “If it’s a ball, I call it a ball. If it’s a strike, I call it a strike.”

2. “I just call them the way I see them.” There is the suggestion that a well-trusted intuition and years of experience were the primary factors in their ability to make these decisions.

3. “The pitch is nothing until I call it.”

So the message for you is to be aware (as in the first two types of calls) of the context of the decision.  If you dwell too much on what has come before, you will run the risk of perpetuating the circumstances that have caused the issue. It has a direct link to your attitudes and beliefs.

Putting Theory in Action

If you’re not quite on track with this year’s goals and have the attitude or belief that you have no control over the situation—marketing has clogged the system, there are too many competitors, clients don’t want to see us anymore, territories are too big or too small—then your decisions will reflect  “more of the same” belief.

As a result, you’re primarily only using the first part of your wisdom:  looking for patterns. You’ll complain about the situation; and in your mind, you’ll be right! “All I see is all I chose to see!”

The third response involves all three components of wisdom. You’re aware of the patterns AND you’re using the emotional control to inject the calmness to ask, “What needs to be done and is it right for the business.” More important,  you can do this quickly.

Bottom Line

All good decision makers resist the expediency habit. Peter Drucker put it like this: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

Decisions, then, reflect a certain kind of uniqueness. Maybe some things have changed or are different, but you’re prepared to ask those two questions each time. Decisions are objective and for the good of the team’s business goals. They reflect possibility and vision, not perpetuation of the comfort of the status quo.

In short, you use wisdom to put your sales team in danger of success.