![]() Take the time to understand where you went wrong. Making a bad decision is painful, but you can at least partially redeem it by learning from the experience. Or maybe you didn’t listen to your wife’s qualms about relocating, and now it’s escalated into a full-blown crisis. Perhaps you overlooked growing signs of economic trouble and pushed ahead with the new line, despite knowing that luxury brands often struggle during a recession. Maybe you didn’t vet the new job candidate carefully enough, and relied on your gut instead of thoroughly canvassing her past supervisors and colleagues. But there are also plenty of bad decisions that, if we’re honest, we could have prevented. Could the problem realistically have been foreseen? Sometimes, we’re blindsided - you signed a lease just before a natural disaster struck, or company strategy changed dramatically right after you accepted a new job. You and Your Team Series Decision MakingĮxtract the lesson. It’s essential to take a clear view of how to remedy the bad decision. If you absolutely hate your new job after a month, you may want to resign ASAP, so the company can make an offer to a qualified runner-up they spoke with during your recruitment process. On the other hand, some problems require drastic and decisive action. ![]() You may have approved an expansion into Southern California that’s floundering, but perhaps you can temporarily scale back to a Los Angeles County pilot to learn more about the new market. You may have hired the wrong person for the job, but if she has the right attitude, she may be open to remedial training to get her skills up to par. Sometimes a bad decision isn’t a fatal one. But if, rationally, it’s never going to be successful, or will take decades to pay off and you need a much shorter timetable, it’s far better for your career to accept the loss now, rather than dragging it out and wasting even more resources. Similarly, you may have expended a great deal of political capital advocating for a geographic expansion, so it feels right to keep fighting for it until it proves successful. That’s why many people stay in unhappy relationships (“but we’ve been together for five years already!”) or hold onto losing stocks (“I bought it at $40 a share and I’m waiting for it to come back”), even when those prospects are dim. Humans are highly susceptible to the sunk cost fallacy, which makes it hard for us to end something into which we’ve already put time, money, or effort. Here’s what to do when you’re starting to realize you’ve made a bad decision. But it can feel overwhelming to admit the mistake in front of your colleagues and professional network. It’s human nature to be optimistic and assume that success is just around the corner.Įventually, as the ominous evidence mounts, you may start to doubt your idea. Maybe you hired the wrong person, or took a job that wasn’t a good fit, or launched a new product line that no one seems to want. It can be painful to admit when we’ve made a bad decision.
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