The Introvert Leader

How to Make Tough Decisions at Work

• Austin Hopkins

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0:00 | 10:04

The people who grow the fastest in their careers know how to make decisions, even when both options are terrible. In this episode, I share a five-question framework I’ve used for over a decade to make fast, clear decisions, plus how to recover when you get it wrong.


Timestamps

01:18 – StoryTime: Where I developed the decision-making framework.

03:30 – The 5 Lens Decision Making Framework: The five key questions I run every decision through to reduce fear and make high-quality decisions fast. 

5:37 – What to Do When All the Options Suck: My two survival questions for navigating no-win situations where none of the choices feel right.

7:25 – How to Bounce Back After a Bad Decision: Three keys to recovering fast when you make the wrong call.

9:16 – Challenge for Listeners: Take one uncomfortable decision you’ve been avoiding and run it through this framework.


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SPEAKER_00:

Should I stay in college even though I hate it with every ounce of my being? Should I apply for the promotion at work even though there are way more qualified candidates? Should I be honest with my team about the layoffs coming later this year? Every day of our lives, we face uncomfortable decisions. I'm not talking about the easy decisions like should I start taking creatine or should I watch the new show everyone's talking about? I'm talking about the decisions where the stakes feel high and both paths seem foggy and scary. These are the decisions that cause paralysis, anxiety, and sleepless nights. If you want to make more money, if you want to move up faster, if you want to stand out, it's time you get a handle on how you make decisions. You can't let fear keep you from taking bold action this year. Today, I'm gonna give you a framework that I've used for over a decade to make high stakes decisions incredibly fast, even when the options suck. I'm gonna show you how to recover even when you get it wrong. Jeff Bezos famously said, if I make three good decisions a day, that's enough, and they should be as high quality as I can make them. Hello, this is your host, Austin Hopkins, and welcome to the Introvert Leader Podcast. Now I want to tell you where this framework actually came from. For nearly eight years, I was a branch manager at a large bank. A huge part of my job was standing in the middle of the lobby all day managing chaos. Every single day, we had like 15 to 20 scheduled appointments, new accounts, mortgage research, missing funds, fraud issues, you name it. And on top of that, we had maybe 50 to 60 people just walking in needing immediate help. And it wasn't small stuff either. I'm talking about people whose credit cards were stolen, people who were sending wires to close on a home, people who just discovered fraud on their account and were panicking. And here's the problem. My branch only had two bankers who had to help clients, keep service levels high, and still hit aggressive sales goals. On average, a banker could help maybe two people an hour. So the math wasn't mathing. And everyone needed help and everyone was in a rush, and the consequences were real. If we didn't cancel a credit card fast enough, someone could lose thousands of dollars. If we missed a wire cutoff, a family couldn't close on their home. If my bankers missed their numbers, they could get written up. Every single day, I was making hundreds of decisions, and most of them had to be made in under two minutes. Who gets helped first? Who waits? Who do I pull off break? Who needs the most experienced banker? Who needs sales this day? Who can wait 10 minutes without it becoming a disaster? This was my baptism by fire, and in the beginning I messed up a lot. A lot. I made the wrong calls, I misread situations, I pissed people off. But over time, something kind of clicked. I started seeing patterns. I learned how to deploy my resources better. I learned how to help the most people in the shortest amount of time while keeping people happy. I learned how to explain my decisions clearly to my team so they trusted me, even when they didn't like the choice. Over the course of a decade, through hundreds of thousands of decisions, I built a framework that helped me keep my clients, my team, and my company moving forward. I remember one day when my assistant manager pulled me aside and says, I don't know how you make so many decisions so fast. I just smiled and said, I didn't always, I learned it over a decade. Over time, I realized I wasn't reacting in the moment anymore. I was running every decision through the same five lenses over and over again. And when I did that, decisions got faster, they got cleaner, and they were way less reactive. I still use those five lenses today. And once you learn them, you're gonna stop fearing decisions and you're gonna get the confidence to be decisive. So I want to share the framework, the five lenses that are gonna help you make better decisions. So the first one, you gotta know the stakes. Small stakes mean wrong decisions have less impact, which means you can spend less time worrying about the outcome. Big stakes mean you need to be right. If the stakes are high, you got to think about the potential impact on your growth, your reputation, your career, along with what could do major damage. If you piss off a senior leader with the wrong decision, that's something that's hard to come back from. But if you piss your boss off or a coworker, they're probably gonna let it go. Now the next lens I always look through is speed. A slow, good decision isn't worth much in most industries. Companies value speed over almost everything else. Anyone can make a good decision if they have unlimited time and resources. The differentiator is when you have the ability to make high-quality decisions with no time. Speed allows you to beat your competitors and respond to the real world conditions. You don't always have to be right, but being first is always going to be incredibly valuable. The next lens I always look through is listening to my gut. So you got to trust your gut. There's a reason you are where you are. You're sitting on a well of experience. Most of the time you already know what you need to decide. Your gut is just waiting to be listened to. And when that big decision arises, I want you to quiet your mind and ask yourself if I only had one minute to make the decision, which way would I go? Now the next lens that I always look through is I try to look at the macro versus the micro. Most people think too small. Let's just be honest. They worry about the tiniest inconsequential details, or they think in days instead of weeks and years. The pros think in years and they think about the macro. When you're faced with a tough decision at work, quickly extrapolate the potential outcomes a year from now, three years, five years in the future. What's this gonna mean to me in five years? How does this fit into the company's vision? What would my CEO think of this decision? Now the final lens to look through is the benefit of the most amount of people. What use is a good decision if it only benefits you? The best decisions have a positive impact on the largest number of people. A decision that hurts more people than it helps, unfortunately, isn't a good decision. You gotta ask yourself which decisions help the most people around me, my team, my department, my company. I think helping people is always gonna be the right decision. Now, most decisions in your career can be handled with that framework, but every once in a while, you're gonna face a no-in scenario. I'm talking about the ones where you have to go into survival mode. I want to help you figure out how to approach those no-win decisions. And I call them my survival questions. These are two questions I ask myself if I can't use the framework. So most of the time, I can use that framework, but sometimes there's no good options. And there's gonna be plenty of those moments in your career. Maybe it's you deciding which underperforming employee to let go at the end of the quarter. Maybe it's deciding who to promote and who to keep where they are. Maybe it's deciding how to give your boss bad news. Not every decision has a perfect option. And if you expect every decision to have perfect conditions, you aren't living in reality. So here are the two super simple questions that I ask myself in survival mode. The first one is what can I bounce back from the quickest? Like I said, they're gonna be decisions that you face that no matter what you do, they're a loss, like choosing between admitting to a client you messed up or maybe letting them find out on their own. Both suck, but one may be impossible to bounce back from. Some losses are worse than others. Years ago, I heard someone tell me their motto and it totally stuck with me. They always asked, what will get me shot versus what will get me killed? What decision will suck, but I can actually handle? And what decision is certain death? Now, when you're facing a tough choice like this, always go with the one that's gonna hurt, but that won't get you out of the game. Now, the second survival question I always ask myself in those no-in scenarios is what decision aligns with the long-term game I'm playing? The decisions we make today play out years in the future. It's a ripple effect. Are you making the less ideal choice now to set you up for the future? I remember when I decided to quit my sales job and to go back to high school after I had dropped out. It was gonna be embarrassing and my ego is gonna take a big hit in the short term. But I knew that if I ever wanted to have a career, you gotta have a high school diploma. So I sucked it up, I went back to school. This was a short-term decision that sucked, but that set me up for the future. And lose-lose situations suck, but making the wrong decision sucks even more. So I want to help you figure out how to bounce back after you make the wrong decision. Even if you had unlimited time to make every single decision, you'd still make the wrong choice once in a while. All the data and experience in the world can't protect you from real world conditions. So I want to share with you how I learned how to bounce back after I mess up. And I've messed up a lot. So these are tried and true and I know they work. Number one, you gotta learn from your mistakes. Rookies make the same mistakes over and over again. They either don't realize the pattern, or even worse, they ignore it. But I think someone like you, you're not a rookie. I don't think you are. So when you make a crappy decision this year that doesn't work out, I want you to ask yourself a couple of simple questions. What didn't I see about the landscape? Where were my blind spots? Did I listen to my gut? Did I let someone else influence my decision? Did I make a decision for optics or my ego? The next thing you gotta do is you gotta own your losers. You know what's worse than making a bad decision? Making a bad choice and not owning it. Maybe you've even seen your boss do it. They tell the team to skip a new operating procedure to save time, and then compliance comes down hard on the team. And instead of owning it, they blame someone else on the team. They pass the buck. Don't be like them. When you mess up, just admit it and move on. Two things happen. People respect you more, people trust you more. The next key to bouncing back quick is you gotta be the goldfish. You're gonna make some poor decisions in your career. It's unavoidable, they're impossible to predict, and you're gonna be tempted to dwell and overthink them. You're gonna stew about them. You're gonna let it ruin your day, you're gonna let it ruin your week. But the secret to bouncing back is being like the goldfish. The sooner you can forget the poor decision and how it feels and move on, the faster you can get to the next important decision. And guess what? When you make that next big decision, you're gonna start feeling better. So be like the goldfish, forget, move on, don't dwell. So we covered the framework today, the five lenses to look through whenever you're making a decision. We talked about how to bounce back when things don't go well, and we talked about how to approach know-in situations. This week I want you to take one decision you've been avoiding. Not the easy one, not the one that you think you could make right away. I'm talking about the one you keep pushing off. And I want you to run it through this framework. Then make the call, even if it's imperfect, especially if it's uncomfortable. It's so amazing to be back in 2026. We have an awesome year planned. We're gonna be talking about a whole variety of things. Things are gonna set you apart in your career, how to handle performance reviews. We're gonna talk about senior leadership, we're gonna talk about communication, you name it, we're gonna cover it all. And I want to say thank you so much for listening. Make it a great day. This has been the Introvert Leader Podcast. Subscribe for new episodes every other Wednesday.

Contributor

Austin Hopkins

Host