The Hindu Business Line : Crossing the Rubicon!

The global nature of business and the competing demands on our time and other resources have made decision-making an increasingly difficult process while at the same time, benchmark information and best practices are available at the touch of a button.

When decisions become dilemmas

The decisions a manager makes fall into the routine and non-routine types. Routine decisions fall within our comfort zones as we have experience to fall back on and precedents to look at and learn from.

Non-routine decisions cause a lot of anxiety and sometimes even stress. The result of such anxiety and stress is very often non-action. For example, when confronted with decisions that have a far-reaching impact on employees while at the same time are necessary for organisations to survive, create a serious dilemma and if not acted upon in time and with decisiveness can lead to a decision paralysis.

This dilemma around “to do or not to do” can be likened to the challenge involved in “crossing the Rubicon”.

Interestingly, organisations that struggle from lack of an execution culture see their plans remain on the shelf without being implemented.

Such organisations must seriously examine the decision-making habits of their managers. Very likely, you will notice that ‘Crossing the Rubicon’ is an organisation-wide dilemma. And unless this is addressed decisively and senior managers set an appropriate role model for the rest of the crew to emulate and follow, these organisations will suffer from flawed execution strategies.

Crossing the Rubicon

Crossing the Rubicon represents a point of no return. In short, it means, as managers we create an intention to make progress and proceed with courage towards the tough decisions and reach a point where it does not make sense to look back and return.

This comes with practice and patience. This also involves the following three critical steps:

Define an end goal or decision to be achieved and be clear about it

Mobilise emotions that support the decision to be made

Recognise emotions that hinder progress towards the decision

The challenge for most managers is to recognise where their ‘Rubicon’ lies with respect to the decision dilemmas they are faced with from time to time. This is key to becoming successful at making tough decisions and progressing with them involves marshalling one’s resources, mostly emotional, to get to a point from where returning to the original state of non-action or indecision is actually not an option.

Crossing the Rubicons in our lives

Understanding specific ‘Rubicons’ and how to cross them will be helpful to us even in our personal lives when we are confronted with dilemmas relating to a career switch, location changes, moving into management roles, choosing specialisations, and other myriad cross-road confusions.

Drawing upon our emotional fortitude and exploring unexplored options and possibilities helps us identify the Rubicons and cross them in time and with confidence. And there lies the hope for success as against the fear of failure.

(The writer is a Senior Vice-President and Chief People Officer with Symphony Services Corporation.)

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