How Leaders Make The Right Call With Insights, Integrity And Empathy

“Leadership is about tough choices, and making tough choices shows leadership,” explains Eric Pliner, author of the new book, Difficult Decisions. 

As you read the book, you’ll discover how morals and ethics interact with the day-to-day responsibilities of real leadership and triangulate to point the way towards consistency and confidence that others can trust. 

Furthermore, Pilner shows, when leaders achieve a profound understanding of themselves, their organizations, and the world they live in now, the road ahead is illuminated. 

Difficult Decisions is ideal for executives, managers, and business leaders to examine their own intuition and navigate the most conflicted choices they make. It’s a challenging read and an indispensable resource to help readers develop self-reflection, clarify their values, and ultimately make the choice that is most “right” to them.  

Some of the key takeaways from the book for me include: 

• Making everyone happy is impossible; shaping a net-positive outcome is made more likely by exploring the moral, ethical, and role responsibility triangle (explained within the book) regularly and in advance. 
• Values tell us what we stand for; morals tell us what we absolutely won’t stand for. 
• Leading with integrity demands regularly revisiting the leader’s moral code, ethical context, and understanding of role responsibilities.
• Any decision made with intent is better than no decision – or a decision made by default. 
• Leaders are as accountable for clearly communicating the process by which the decision will be made as they are for communicating the content of the decision. 

Eric Pliner

Finally, follow this 10-step process when you need to make a tough decision: 

1. As yourself, “What am I deciding?”
2. Consider your stakeholder set.
3. Ask, “Should I be deciding?”
4. Ask, “By when must this decision be made?”
5. Determine how the question should be decided.
6. Clarify exactly who you are going to engage and how you intend to do so.
7. Before you discuss the content of the decision with the identified stakeholder(s), explain clearly and directly exactly how the decision is going to be made.
8. Standardize the process to focus on decision-making.
9. Ask your stakeholder(s) for their input.
10. Thank your stakeholder(s) for their input and remind them about how the decision is going to be made. 

Add this book to your must-read list. It will undoubtedly help you make better decisions, and therefore, you'll become a more effective leader.

Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.