In today’s complex and sometimes chaotic working world, leaders are often relied upon to make tough calls with limited time or information. But when the buck stops with you, how do you stop yourself from buckling under the pressure?
In this blog, we’ll be sharing some tangible tips to help you recentre, refocus and act decisively without sacrificing quality or having too many unintended consequences raise their ugly, unexpected heads.
In high-pressure situations when you’re called upon to make an important decision, it’s common to feel like you’re in a time crunch, whether genuine urgency exists or not.
Experienced frontline workers like paramedics, who are regularly called upon to make life or death decisions, often speak about the importance of pausing to assess the scene before acting. This might seem counterintuitive in a situation where every second counts, but skipping this step can easily end up causing further harm.
If you react rather than respond, your emotions will be in the driving seat. You may also experience tunnel vision - a cognitive phenomenon that occurs when you’re so focused on what's in front of you that you fail to assess new information or assess consequences - hardly an ideal state for good decision making.
To avoid making decisions from a place of panic, it’s vitally important that you take a moment to check in with yourself first, whatever that looks like for you - I like journaling or taking my dog for a walk to think things through.
Another common response to pressure is to freeze. When this occurs, we often spend time not just thinking through a decision but overthinking it.
This is particularly likely to occur when it appears that you have no good options on the table. Not only does this sense of being trapped create additional stress, it can also mean that your range of choices actually shrinks further as you waste time through procrastination - because not making a decision is a way of having a decision made for you.
If you find yourself freezing - a good way to come unstuck is to grab some time with a coach, a peer, or a trusted friend to talk through options and help clarify your thinking.
There are many decision making frameworks out there - the SWOT analysis, the Eisenhower Matrix and the POWER model to name just a few.
As a leader, it’s important to experiment with different models to get a feel of what suits your style and works within your context.
However, one we like at tyllr is the SOS model - a simple yet holistic tool designed to support decision making.
SOS helps you break down a complex problem and evaluate the impact of any given decision on a range of stakeholders, inviting you to consider:
Check out our SOS tool blog for prompts for each of these different buckets and a step by step guide to help you use the model effectively in a wide range of contexts.
Why we love it: the SOS model is useful because it touches on so many important elements of decision making under pressure - balancing long and short term needs, surfacing assumptions that might be impacting your thinking and helping you to consider the wider impact of a decision.
As a leader, it can feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders - but it’s crucial to remember that you’re not alone when it comes to making decisions.
Good decision makers don’t seek complete consensus - but they do think carefully about who might have valuable expertise, context or perspective to share.
When seeking counsel from others, give a brief overview of your goal, the options you’re evaluating and what, specifically, you’d like advice on. You might also find it helpful to invite opinions that contrast your own instincts to stress test your thinking.
Whilst the reactivity and paralysis we describe above are common responses to having to make a tough call, it is possible to build the capacity to make decisions more quickly and confidently over time.
If you have a few minutes after reading this article, we invite you reflect on the last few decisions you made under pressure using the below prompts:
Once you can see clearly what your default decision making model is, then you’ll be able to experiment with different ways of thinking and acting - and make better decisions as a result.
Making good decisions under pressure isn’t about rushing - or freezing. It’s about finding a centred, clear-headed place to act from. This article shares practical strategies to help you pause without panicking, seek input without deferring responsibility, and choose tools - like the SOS model - that help you think about the impact on yourself, others, and the wider system. With practice, you can build the confidence to decide well, even when the stakes are high.
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