Decision-Making 101: Rules of Thumb | Center for Leadership | Florida International University | FIU
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Decision-Making 101: Rules of Thumb

Whether you are a hardened executive or a fresh-faced intern, successfully navigating the obstacles of your daily life requires making decisions. And when it comes to managing people, the burden of decision making takes on an even more prominent role as the stakes are often much higher.

As an executive coach, I often come across clients who are facing decision-making challenges. Making the right call isn't always easy. To delve more deeply into the decisionmaking process, I sat down with Mitch Maidique, executive director of the Florida International University Center for Leadership, to detail what goes into making a decision.

According to Maidique, "experienced managers tend to resort to judgmental heuristics" that he refers to as "rules of thumb" or ROTs for short. He defines a ROT as "a principal derived from personal experience that provides almost immediate guidance for behavior in certain situations." In other words, it's a simple shortcut that we fall back on when faced with a choice: Most of us tend to think of this as a gut reaction or intuition.

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Read: "Decision-Making 101: Rules of Thumb", an article from Fox.

Click here to see Dr. Michael 'Woody' Woodward explaining Decision Making on video.