When Should A Manager Go With Their Gut?

Should we believe what our gut is telling us?
Should we believe what our gut is telling us?
Image Credit: Admirer21stCentury

As managers, the one thing that we’d all like to be able to do is to use our manager skills to always make the right decision. Just imagine: you’d never again have to worry about being wrong! The problem is that none of us has gotten the required manager training or figured out how to make this happen. Since we’re not there yet, I’m pretty sure that most of us would just be happy if we could find a way to be right more often than not. It turns out that there is a way to make this simpler request happen: start listening to your gut more.

The Power Of Listening To Your Gut

So just exactly how do managers go about making important decisions currently? Most of us start off by doing some research. We might then go ahead and write down both the pros and the cons associated with our different options. The best of us will then take the time to discuss our options over with both family and friends in order to get their inputs. But now what? How can we be sure that we’re going to be making the correct decision?

This is the time to trust your intuition. For that matter just exactly what is intuition? It turns out that this is when your mind has the ability to understand something without the need for you to have conscious reasoning. A number of different studies have been done that have shown that the decisions that we make unconsciously before our rational mind has a chance to become involved turn out to often be the better decision.

The problem that managers can run into is that our gut is not always correct. Managers tend to trust what their gut is telling them over what their rational thoughts are simply because they happen so quickly that we believe that they must be true. However, there is a problem with this belief. It turns out that our emotional state can change what our gut is telling us. How we feel right now may not be how we are going to be feeling later on.

How Best To Listen To Your Gut

The people who study such things tell us that what our gut is really good at doing is finding ways to help us sort things out. An example of this is determining if we are currently in immediate danger. Our gut can also help us to identify our preferences. Additionally it can help us to make complex decisions even when we’ve been overwhelmed with information.

What managers need to keep in mind is that if we allow it to, our gut can make us behave impulsively. We need to take a careful look at the situation that we are required to make a decision about. If the consequences of our decision are very high, then we are not going to want to only rely on what our gut is telling us. Additionally, if the decision that we are trying to make is going to end up affecting someone else also, then we are going to want to not rely on our gut alone in order to reach our decision.

The most important part about using your gut to make decisions is to make sure that your gut has an effective communication channel to your brain. What this means is that you are going to have to keep a careful eye on what you are eating. Eating a lot of refined foods can screw up your gut’s connection to your brain. Managers need to keep in mind that good foods can go a long way in creating mental clarity.

What All Of This Means For You

The ability to make good decisions is one of the hallmarks of being a good manager. However, making good decisions can be difficult to do as you are surrounded by many options and lots of supporting data. One way that managers can do a better job of making good decisions is to learn when to trust what their gut is telling them.

Every manager would like to be able to make the correct decision more often. In order to make this happen, we need to find a way to trust our intuition. The unconscious decisions that our gut makes for us can often be the right decision. One problem that we run into is that our gut is telling us what to do so quickly that we assume that it is correct and this is not always the case. Our gut can help us to sort things out. However, our gut can also cause us to behave impulsively. Managers need to remember that what they put into their gut can affect how easily their gut can communicate with the brain.

In the fast paced world in which we all live, the ability to make the right decision and to make it quickly is becoming more and more important for managers. As we search for ways to make this happen, we need to understand that our gut has the ability to quickly tell us what we should be doing. We need to understand that the gut has limitations, but if we are aware of these then we can use our gut to become an even better manager.

– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: If your gut is telling you to do something, what do you think is the best way to double check to make sure that is the right decision?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

In the day-to-day activities of a manager, most of us really don’t spend all that much time thinking about our company’s corporate culture. However, it turns out that it really does matter. If your company has a bad corporate culture, then it’s going to have a negative impact on the company’s bottom line results, its reputation, and in the end, recruitment. It sure seems as though managers need to start spending some time using their manager skills to look into how they can improve the company’s culture.