Soft Skills for the Professional Services Industry

CHAPTER 10Decision Making

AN IMPORTANT TASK OF professionals is decision‐making, and all professionals make a large number of decisions every day. This applies to both their professional and private lives. Professionals with employee responsibilities also make decisions that are relevant for the team or the entire company. Malik reduces the task of decision‐making to managers. He claims that this shows the difference between a manager and a clerk. A person who does not decide is not a manager. In decisions, everything comes together, everything comes to a point. Deciding is not the only manager's task, but it is a critical one. Certainly, decisions in the management of employees have a greater significance than decisions made by a professional in the context of their factual tasks without direct reference to employees. However, since every professional, regardless of whether they are a manager or not, makes a large number of decisions every day, it would be too short‐sighted to view the topic of “decision‐making” exclusively from the perspective of a manager.

In many cases, professionals make decisions too quickly. This is especially true when they think it is clear what has to be decided. In many cases, however, it is not clear from the outset what has to be decided, but it has to be found out first. The greatest possible sense of reality on the part of a professional helps here, because often facts are either made worse than they are or presented better than they actually ...