Decision-making is at the heart of a corporate treasurer’s role: where to invest, which deals to do, how much to pay for funds and what risk profile to accept. This constant pressure to make decisions can have a profound effect on your private life, your career development and your personal effectiveness.
It’s a nasty little problem called ‘decision fatigue’. What happens is that making decisions reduces your effectiveness at making your next decisions. The more decisions you need to make, the more fatigued your mental processes become. It takes effort – mental energy – to make a decision and this energy eventually becomes depleted. You run out of ‘decision power’.
As your energy declines, the consequence is that your decisions either take longer, as you struggle to marshal the energy they take, or you take shortcuts and fail to evaluate the evidence properly. Typically, your default response is what you perceive as the lowest risk.
In an interview with Vanity Fair magazine in October 2012, US president Barack Obama said: “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”
One of the typical results of decision fatigue is our almost automatic ‘yes’ response to any request that comes our way in the office. This has doubtless been a good strategy for you in the past – and maybe it still is – for a period. At the start of our careers, we often progress by being good at saying ‘yes’ and delivering. And at the start of our careers we imagine that, as we progress, the workload will diminish, as we have more people to delegate to.
It takes effort – mental energy – to make a decision and this energy eventually becomes depleted
Sadly, that isn’t true – it is the opposite. As you progress through your career, rising up the professional and corporate ladder, there will be more and more responsibilities, more and more calls on your time, more and more things to say ‘yes’ to. This is not sustainable. There is a limit to how much you can take on before you start failing, losing a grip on the quality, running late, getting stressed and failing to deliver.
If your only response is ‘yes’, then not only will you fail, you will soon start to lose the respect of your senior colleagues. It may even affect your promotion prospects. Sure, they will still like you – you are an easy touch, and people come to view you as a bit of a doormat. They ask: you do. It’s easy. But liking is not respect and too little discrimination in what you say ‘yes’ to will mean that your workload will be crowded with things that you really ought not to be doing.
The most powerful word in time management is ‘no’. Indeed, ‘no’ is the solution for people who are great at time management, but still can’t get everything done. But there is a problem for most of us. You probably think that the trouble with ‘no’ is that it is just too negative for you. Nobody wants to sound negative. So, here’s the magic…
What if you could transform ‘no’ from a negative to a positive response? You can. ‘No’ is positive when it is not a word, but an acronym. N.O. stands for ‘Noble Objection’.
When you make a Noble Objection, you decline to do something for a noble reason, because it is not the best use of your time. There are two criteria for a NO to be noble:
There are four steps to saying NO.
Nothing betrays a lack of confidence as clearly as your body language. Your voice should be firm and steady: neither too loud (defensive) nor too quiet (passive). Speak slowly and stop at the end of your sentence. Look the person in the eye and give a small shake of your head to reinforce the NO. Stand or sit straight, and position your body squarely towards the person you are speaking with.
‘No’ is the solution for people who are great at time management.
Dr Mike Clayton is a business speaker and author of nine books. His latest, The Yes/No Book, was published in October 2012 by Pearson. Find out more at: www.mikeclayton.co.uk
