Decision-making skills: Definitions & examples

Decision-making skills are extremely desirable to employers and essential when navigating problems in the workplace. Learn about what these skills are and how you can improve your decision-making skills. 

• What are decision-making skills?
• Examples of decision-making skills
• Jobs that require decision-making skills
• How to improve decision-making skills
• How to use decision-making skills at your workplace
• How to include decision-making skills in a CV
• How to include decision-making skills in a cover letter
• Decision-making skills interview questions and answers
• To sum up

What are decision-making skills?

Decision-making is the ability to be confident in the choice you’re making based on the advice, research and experience you have at hand. Having good decision-making skills is crucial for problem-solving in the workplace and is even more important if you become a team leader. Decision-making includes assessing all the options available and recognising the potential outcomes of each option before choosing which path to take. Decisions, both large and small, can have an impact on entire companies, so it is important that leaders have good decision-making skills. To become a leader, you should be able to make effective decisions and steer your company towards long-term success.

Decision-making skills are soft skills that can be transferred to many different work settings. This is why having this skill is so valuable to employers. The ability to make good decisions involves utilising other soft skills such as logical reasoning, intuition, teamwork, conflict resolution, emotional intelligence, collaboration and active listening. Each company and sector of work has slightly different processes for making important decisions so the specific decision-making skills required for every job differ. 

Examples of decision-making skills

There are lots of different types of decision-making skills. We have compiled a list with descriptions to help you understand the different abilities that will impact your decision-making. You may be strong in some of these specific skills but weaker in others, so this is a great way to improve specific aspects of your decision-making skills to increase your employability.

Logical reasoning

In order to produce an informed decision, you must consider all the facts in the situation. Logic is needed to assess all the pros and cons of different actions or responses. Personal views and emotions must be taken out of the equation to ensure you come to the best conclusion.  

Ready to put your logical reasoning to the test? Take this practice logical reasoning test.

Intuition

Intuition is the way you view a situation naturally without the use of established procedures or tools. The decisions we make the quickest are usually made intuitively. Intuition when making decisions improves with experience as you have proven knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. 

Teamwork

The use of a team when decision-making is crucial. When teamwork is used effectively, it can hugely reduce the time and effort it takes to make a decision. However, if used ineffectively, it can hinder the efficiency of the decision-making process. Teamwork creates a great opportunity for different people to provide their knowledge and the situation can be viewed from differing perspectives.

Conflict resolution

This is a key skill, particularly when making decisions around controversial or highly disputed topics in the workplace. Communication is an essential aspect of conflict resolution. Compromising with others and accommodating varying views is also very important when trying to reduce potential conflicts when decision-making. 

Learn how to adapt your communication style. 

Emotional intelligence

The skill of emotional intelligence involves being aware of your emotions and others' emotions as well as being in control of your own emotions. It additionally includes expressing such emotions in a healthy way. When decision-making, it’s crucial that you don’t let your emotions take over when trying to produce a balanced decision. This helps stop your decision from being influenced by your own personal biases and desires.

Collaboration 

Most decisions require the input of others to come to a conclusion. You must be able to recognise when decisions require collaborative efforts and then adopt an effective team approach to come to the most appropriate decision. Communication is essential when working collaboratively on decisions and the ability to listen and take on board others' thoughts and knowledge.

Active listening 

When collaborating on decisions, everyone must be listening actively to others’ points of view. This involves making sure everyone feels what they are saying is being heard. Active listening may include asking questions or making notes so you are really absorbing the information as opposed to mindlessly listening without taking in what they are saying. 

Jobs that require decision-making skills

If you enjoy using decision-making skills, there are loads of jobs that require making many decisions meaning you can utilise your skills, including the following:

Business operations 

Decision-making skills are important in all aspects of business, most notably business operations or business management roles. In these roles, the ability to view, understand and express the outcomes of different actions is crucial. Decision-making skills help you to analyse such situations quickly so that you can choose the best option with the most positive outcome as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

Learn more about management & operations.

Consulting

Consultancy roles require decision-making skills to help guide businesses to move forward in the correct way. For example, strategy consultants must advise organisations on high-level decisions in an unbiased fashion, using deep industry knowledge to deliver the best results. This involves taking lots of different facts and opinions into consideration to produce the best results.

Learn more about consulting.

Lawyer 

Decision-making is one of the most crucial roles you must perform as a lawyer. This may involve gathering the facts, setting the criteria to define what a successful decision is, evaluating and developing options, assessing risks for different options and then making the decision and following through with it.  

Learn more about getting into law.

Recruitment

When sourcing and selecting candidates to be employed by your own company or another company, decision-making is a crucial skill. You must weigh up the positives and negatives of different candidates and assess the one which performs the best as well as fitting in with the team and culture the best. 

How to improve decision-making skills

If you’re inspired to work on your own decision-making skills, here are some great steps you can take:

Form a plan

If you know you have a decision that you need to make soon, it can help to create a plan for the process which you are going to take to make this decision. You may also choose to assess the information, team and resources you have available to help you make the decision.

Ask for advice 

Don’t be afraid to ask an expert for their take on the decision you have to make or ask them to explain the process they take to make similar decisions. This might be asking your manager or supervisor for their opinion on the task you are working on and the decision that you must make.  

Make it proportionate

This is really important when decision-making. The time you spend making the decision must be proportionate to the gravity of the decision. If a decision is going to have a small impact either way, the time spent forming the decision should be smaller than decisions which have the greatest impact. This can improve your speed when working if you can easily assess the gravity of each decision and adjust your decision-making process accordingly.

Set time frames

When decision-making, setting deadlines for yourself and your team is crucial to prevent decisions from lasting longer than they need to. This can help you to be disciplined when making decisions and to ensure that the decision doesn’t jeopardise other aspects of the task or project.

How to use decision-making skills at your workplace 

When in a professional environment, decision-making skills are used regularly, so knowing how to implement them is very important. Here are some ways you may implement decision-making skills in your workplace:

Organising a poll to assess your team members’ views

This is a great way to understand the varying thoughts around a certain topic and is a good chance to demonstrate that you are taking other people's views into consideration when making a decision. 

Brainstorming ideas with a group

This can help to utilise compromise and discussion skills as well as active listening. When brainstorming with a group, you can elaborate on each other’s ideas to be sure you cover all areas and nothing is missed. It’s possible that not everyone agrees with you, and this is a great chance to use your compromising skills to come to a conclusion that suits all members of the team.

Taking action when a system or process isn't working 

This is a good way to express your proactivity which is an essential feature of decision-making. Being the person to make the change when something is no longer beneficial for the company or organisation also displays your confidence which is a desired decision-making skill.

How to include decision-making skills in your CV

There are lots of ways that you can demonstrate your strong decision-making skills on your CV. Firstly, be sure to include any decision-making words that are mentioned in the job description in your CV. You should also be sure to highlight any roles where you have managed people or groups of people as this demonstrates decision-making skills. This doesn’t just have to be in the workplace and can include volunteering and any society work you’ve done. If you want to go the extra mile when applying for jobs requiring decision-making skills, you could network and seek out professionals in the sector you wish to work in and find out the process for decision-making in their role or company. This may help you to stand out when interviewing for such roles. 

Want to perfect your CV? Read our advice on how to write a CV including downloadable templates for you to use.

How to include decision-making skills in a cover letter

Decision-making skills can be displayed in a cover letter by explaining scenarios when you’ve had to make decisions or have taken leadership. Experience in work or education where you have been leading a team is a great way to show decision-making skills, for example, time in a sports team in school or in a society at university. Similar to the CV, be sure to refer to any skills the job description mentions specifically.

Ready to start writing your cover letter? Read up on structuring cover letters. 

Decision-making skills interview questions and answers

As strong decision-making skills are a desirable trait in employees, interview questions may often be assessing your decision-making. These questions may include, but are not limited to:

• Do you usually make better decisions on your own or working in a group?
• Describe a time when you had to make a quick decision.
• In group work, do you prefer to make most of the decisions or take a more background role and let others make the key decisions?
• Describe a time when you made a decision that was not popular with the rest of the team. What was their reaction and how did you deal with this?
• How would you help your team to meet a deadline if some team members were falling behind?
• When do you ask for help when making decisions?
• If you wanted your manager to upgrade a system to a more expensive programme but with more features, how would you go about proposing this to your manager?

When answering questions like these, the employer is looking to see that you can reach a decision by assessing the pros and cons of each option. Therefore, a high-quality answer would include discussing steps you took to come to the most appropriate decision while also saying any time constraints and how you made the decision-making process as efficient as possible. 

To sum up

Decision-making skills are crucial soft skills, and extremely desirable to employers. You can display the decision-making skills you already possess through your CV and cover letter and practice working on new ones while in the workplace. 

Feel like you’ve got your decision-making skills under control? Learn more about the career skills you need, plus learn all about the problem-solving skills necessary for your career.