Finding excellent employees can sometimes feel like finding your soulmate — you have to meet a lot of people to find the one.

A top concern for CEOs and other executives relates to attracting and retaining talent, according to the 2020 Conference Board Annual Survey. Not only is it time-consuming, but it can be expensive. Gallup shows that “The cost of replacing an individual employee can range from one-half to two times the employee’s annual salary.” Given the challenges around hiring and the high stakes of recruiting, we often rush to fill the vacancy, but bringing the wrong person aboard…

What goes into selecting the right candidate to join your team? While there are many aspects to consider, few are more important than the values of others and how they will align with your team and organization for the best synergy and results.

In Patrick Lencioni’s “The Ideal Team Player,” he argues for the importance of hiring for values and offers his humble, hungry, and smart model. That is, exhibiting humility to think of yourself less, having the drive to pursue your goal aggressively, and the capabilities to be astute in how you interact with others. When recruiters test for…

Every organization consists of teams that face grave challenges — how to innovate faster, build better relationships with clients, respond to competitive threats, decide which products to invest time into and which ones to abandon. How do you decide the best direction?

Here are some tips that help teams make the best decisions together:

1. Get on the same page. In 1999 NASA had a mission to study the climate on the planet Mars. After 10 months of travel and 125 million, the spacecraft burned due to a navigational mistake, which was entirely preventable. It turns out, multiple teams were…

Congratulations, you have taken careful steps to make the decision that is right for you. You got clear on your values, utilized effective informational and creative strategies, followed systems, and took action. Now what?

Depending on your goal, whether it is about improving your decision-making skills, enhancing your current situation by reversing the decision, or just enjoying your peace of mind, you may consider the following:

1. Reflect. If you are interested in improving your decision-making abilities, carve out the necessary time to reflect. After the choice, monitor it. What is working? What approaches, criteria, metrics, and systems did you…

To what degree do you think our decisions determine our lives? Should we stay in a city we have known and enjoyed for a decade-plus or move elsewhere to shake things up? Take a high visibility job with additional responsibilities or focus more on enjoying a balanced and relaxed life? Know when it is time to quit our side hustle or persist? To be human is to be jostled by choice. I have found that to have an edge in decision-making, we want to have a few systems in place to better guide us.

Here are some helpful systems to…

How wise are you at making decisions? In choosing, do you rely more on cognition or intuition? While some people would advocate for the evidence-based, logical approach, others would endorse the way of emotions and gut instinct. Who’s right?

Let’s take a closer look at each:

For some people, rationality is the easy answer. When entangled in a decision, they may make a long list of pros and cons, weigh their choices against a pre-determined set of criteria, evaluate their options objectively, step back, and decide. …

We make thousands of decisions each day, and we are always looking for an edge, a specific way to improve our decision-making abilities so we can have more life satisfaction.

One way to improve our information strategy for better decision-making is to get creative about the problem. Here’s how:

A. Challenge the limitations. Matthew Confer, VP of Strategy at Abilitie offers a tip before deciding to challenge the constraints. He argues that too many teams jump into solving a problem without first considering it. He recommends starting by thinking about what barriers are holding you back and then see what…

When you are thinking about a big decision, how do you decide? What information strategy do you use? Once you have done all the work in clarifying your values, style, and optimal energy state, how do you utilize your external resources to be in a better position to choose?

Here are tips to strengthen your information strategy:

1. Learn more about the things you do not know by tapping into the collective intelligence of others.

A. Talk to people in your network who made that exact decision. If you are thinking about leaving a big corporate job to start your…