What are some of the steps we can take in making great decisions?

We have all spent years and years teaching some of the most effective and successful executives on the planet how to make quality decisions. From our conversations together, we have it boiled down to eight stepsâ€"eight things you need to know and you need to do to make great decisions. Here is the second thing:

2. Assess the Facts, Not Opinions
I’ve gone into organization after organization, and I know that we all have opinions and we see people getting everybody else’s opinions. But it’s not time for opinion is yet. First we need to know what we know.

You have to look behind people’s opinions. They can give you an opinion, but it’s just an opinion. Why did they create these opinions? What are the facts they are basing their opinions on?

It’s time to go fact finding. You make better decisions and faster decisions when you have good, hard, cold facts.

All the great decision makers of the world want to know the facts themselves, not just the opinions people have formulated based on those facts.

I had a staff member who came in with happy garbage news every time. And I said, “Wait, wait, wait! Go to the accounting department, get the numbers, and come back here; because you are asking me to put my money on the line. If it is your money on the line, we will spend your money. If we are spending my money, I have to assess the facts and do accurate thinking so I can get an accurate read on what we are doing, have done, and what we are going to do.

Let’s give a couple of quick examples. An employee might come to you and tell you that all the customers have lost confidence in our product. That’s an opinion. What we want to know is which customers are we talking about and what did they actually say? Are sales falling off? What are the sales now? What were they before?

These are the facts that are going to guide us in our decisions.