You Don't Have to Be Certain. You Have to Be Decisive.

How to make the right call as a new manager when you don't have enough context.

You're leading a new team.

You're making decisions every day.

You're trying to guide your team in the right direction.

But honestly, half the time you're not sure you're making the right call.

In your last role, you were the go-to expert. You had context. You had history. You knew what had been tried before and why.

Now you're the new person. Nobody handed you a transition document. You're putting the pieces together yourself.

And the pressure of making the wrong call is weighing on you.

Here's the reframe that changed everything for me.

Your decision is a hypothesis. Your action is the test.

I want to introduce you to a concept called the OODA Loop.

Observe. Orient. Decide. Act.

It was created by Colonel John Boyd of the US Air Force to enable fighter pilots to make decisions within seconds.

Here's the part that stuck with me: in Boyd's model, the Decision is labeled Hypothesis and the Action is labeled Test.

The decision you're making is not the final word. It's your best guess about what to do next. And the only way to get feedback on that guess is to take action.

The goal is not to be right about the big decision.

The goal is to take action and learn from it.

Thinking about it this way took so much emotional weight off of me. You're not trying to be certain before you move. You're moving in order to get clarity.

You're not making the big final decision. You're making a decision about what to do next.

How to respond when someone brings you a decision to make.

Many of the decisions that come to you arrive through another person, and that person is usually already in an emotional and reactive state.

Something has happened. There's been a disagreement, a new roadblock, some unforeseen event that has put their plan at risk.

Before you can be decisive, you have to get the emotional situation under control.

Start with yourself. I've trained myself to operate at what I call emotion level one. Calm and steady. Not too high when things are good, not rattled when things go sideways.

Then bring the other person down with you. I'll reflect back what I'm hearing: "Wow, that happened? I can see why that's so frustrating." I come up slightly from my steady state, maybe to a level two. They can feel the difference. And I've found that this alone is often enough to bring their anxiety down noticeably. Sometimes there's even an audible sigh of relief.

Now we can actually talk about next steps.

One more thing I've learned: be very cautious about reacting to the first version of a story. The first version is often missing key information. Sometimes it's just wrong. If I react impulsively at this point I could make the situation worse, or create a problem where no real problem existed.

So I ask clarifying questions. I may send the person back to gather more information. They know I'm on their side. I'm not sending them away. I'm just being disciplined about not making emotionally charged decisions with incomplete information.

How to take action.

OK. So you're not waiting for certainty, and you're not reacting impulsively. What are you actually doing?

You're moving through the OODA Loop.

Here's how this usually plays out for me.

Someone comes to me needing a decision. If necessary, I bring down the emotional temperature. I ask for context. Then I ask one simple question: "What is one small step we could take right now in the direction we believe we need to go?"

They can almost always answer that.

We take that step. We get new information we couldn't have had before we moved. Now we decide the next small step.

If the decision is all on you and no one brought it to you, same process. Ask yourself: "What is one small step I could take in the direction I believe I need to go?" Take that action. Get the feedback. Now you're rolling.

You're gaining confidence because you're not stuck. You're moving. You're getting better information with every step.

Remember: your job is not to be certain.

Your job is to be decisive.

And decisive doesn't mean impulsive. It means you know how to move forward even when the whole picture isn't complete.

I'm wishing you all the best, 

Jeff

P.S. If you're in the early days with a new team and you want help building this kind of confidence faster, without burning yourself out or second-guessing every call you make, book a complimentary consultation with me. We'll talk through the decisions you're facing right now, what's actually at stake, and what a smart next step looks like in your situation. I'm taking all of these calls myself right now, so grab a time while you can. Schedule your call here.