Politics comes part and parcel with people at work. The dynamic of negotiating diverse opinions, agendas and priorities need not be negative.

Some of us find ourselves wanting to make everyone happy, though. As soon as we see the implications of our decision from a different perspective, we change our decision.

Willingness to change a decision can be a positive attribute if a better understanding of the facts on the ground will have a significant impact on our ability to achieve our stated goal.

But changing your mind can be disastrous if your rationale is rooted in self-protection, office politics, or people-pleasing. In such a situation, your focus has shifted to the response you are trying to elicit from others. Your focus needs to be steadfastly locked on the desired outcome of the decision.

Your team is proceeding down a certain path, and when they come to work the next day to discover that the path has been changed on them, frustration, resentment and resistance are sure to follow.

It doesn’t have to be this way. How has your waffling on decisions affected those around you?

(Find the entire series Decision-Making with Poise here.)

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Decision-Making with Poise, Working Matters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.