Summary.    We make decisions all day, every day. The way we make decisions depends largely on context and our own unique problem-solving style. But, sometimes a tough workplace situation turns our usual problem-solving style on its head. Situationality is the...

Have you ever noticed that when you go home to your parents’ house, no matter what age you are, you make decisions differently than when you’re at work or out with a group of friends? For many of us, this is a familiar and sometimes frustrating experience — for example, allowing our parent to serve us more food than we want to eat. We feel like adults in our day-to-day lives, but when we step into our childhood homes we revert.

That’s not the only situation in which we change our decision-making habits. We may be a different decision-maker with the coworker who intimidates us, the veteran employee who serves as a mentor, or the recent college grad who has asked for your mentorship.

In other words, we approach decisions differently depending on the context — where we are and which role we’re playing — and the other decision-makers with whom we’re engaging.

Through my research into decision-making, I have identified five different decision-making archetypes, or problem solver profiles, that explain how people tend to approach their decisions. The five problem solver profiles (PSP) are:

• Adventurers, who make decisions easily and go with their gut, but who may downplay evidence, and input from others, if it contradicts their gut reaction
• Detectives, who like to follow the data, but who may overvalue facts and undervalue people
• Listeners, who want to solicit the input of others, but who sometimes can’t hear their own voice
• Thinkers, who thrive on identifying multiple paths and outcomes, but who can struggle to make a decision in a timely manner
• Visionaries, who pride themselves on seeing pathways that others don’t, but who avoid the ordinary even when it’s effective

Most of us rely on one dominant PSP. Each type of problem solver has some real strengths, but also some blind spots — cognitive biases — that impede clear problem solving.

However, what I call “situationality” can also override your dominant PSP. Situationality is more than context. I define situationality as a formula for the situation we find ourselves in: how and where we are working, where we are in our life, who we are deciding with, and how much ownership we have over the decision at hand. So, situationality is a blend of external and internal factors. But it’s important to recognize that each situation is different; we are not static, and neither is the world around us.

Making decisions based on situationality is not always a bad thing. Letting your parent decide how much chicken to serve you lets them show their love for you – even if you know you’d like a smaller portion. Similarly, if you’re an adventurer just starting out at a new job, you may need tune into your listener in order to learn the ropes. Once you’re more comfortable, you can let your natural adventurer come out.

Sometimes, however, situationality can present a problem. It can change our decision-making approach in a way that causes friction. As it did with Miriam.

Miriam is the chief executive and founder of an agriculture technology start-up. Using my PSP quiz, she identified herself as a listener, someone who likes to gather the wisdom of others, tends to have a trusted group of advisors to discuss their decisions with, and avoids conflict.

“I enjoy listening to the perspectives of others on any topic because I understand that we all think differently,” Miriam observed. “I like thinking about how one decision can impact people very differently.” Like other listeners, Miriam makes new friends easily and connects with strangers virtually everywhere she goes.

However, shortly after we began working together, Miriam confessed that she had had repeated communication difficulties with her cofounder, and that their relationship had turned rancorous. Recently, he had begun ghosting her. Typically, this kind of acrimony would be very difficult for a listener who values relationships and excels at building them. I pointed out the apparent contradiction to Miriam, who was as puzzled as I was.

She felt stuck. She knew she needed to sever this problematic relationship, but she didn’t understand what had gone wrong. She had another employee, Andre, and she was concerned that history might repeat itself, without her understanding why. Would he ghost her too? She didn’t know him very well, but thought they had a good relationship. How could she move forward and “break-up” with her cofounder in a way that didn’t make Andre collateral damage?

To help Miriam become unstuck, I asked her to think about how her CEO situationality might be undercutting her dominant PSP, or her listener tendencies.

Thinking about situationality means looking at yourself as though you are a character in a story. I’ve created a rubric with eight questions to help you 1) frame the problematic work situation that requires a decision, 2) tease out some of the key situational factors that are influencing your decision-making, and 3) take a specific action to improve your decision-making with others. Use these questions to better understand how you may be making work-related decisions differently depending upon the situation you’re in.

1. Define the problem.

What negative experience are you having in the workplace that requires a decision? Often, we communicate and make decisions in a way that feels comfortable to us but doesn’t get the result we expect.

Miriam, in her early 30s, was in conflict with her cofounder. She couldn’t understand what went wrong but didn’t want his removal from the company to negatively impact her relationship with her remaining employee, Andre. She told me, “I’m the CEO but my cofounder won’t answer my calls. I haven’t heard from him in weeks. I thought he was doing his job, as I was doing mine but now I don’t know. I can’t afford to have this situation fester any longer. It’s impacting the company and Andre.”

2. Assess location and team dynamics.

Where are you working? Are you in an office or working remotely? Part of a team or working independently? If you’re part of a team, does your team have regular meetings or are you mostly on your own?

Where you work and your role can affect your comfort, communication, and confidence as a decision-maker. Miriam had begun her career working in a lab, where she was largely on her own, running experiments. Since starting her business, she’d been working remotely from the basement of her father’s house due to the pandemic. She was comfortable working alone, although she observed that it was “sometimes hard to feel like a CEO.” Since she had never really worked as part of a team, she assumed that an independent working style worked for others as well as it worked for her. She hadn’t organized regular company meetings, expecting others to do their work independently.

3. Consider your career stage.

Are you starting your career, at your peak, or counting the days until retirement? We expect a new employee to listen and learn and an experienced one to lead the team, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes if you’re new at the job, you may feel pressure to prove yourself. And a senior employee may feel comfortable stepping back and letting more junior staff take charge. Thinking about your career stage can help you understand your decision-making behavior.

As a lab scientist without any direct experience working with a CEO, Miriam unwittingly adopted a CEO persona. “I am a scientist by training,” she told me. “So, founding a company was a big leap for me. As the CEO of a start-up, I knew I owned the decisions. I felt I needed to move quickly and decisively because that’s what CEOs do.”

4. Adopt other people’s perspectives.

Who are the other stakeholders in the decision-making process and what is their relationship to you? Are you trying to make your boss look good or does the outcome of this decision primarily impact your own work?

Miriam saw herself as the co-head of a three-person team, all working toward the same goal. Her cofounder’s ghosting challenged that idea. As we discussed this question, Miriam realized that while she assumed that Andre wanted the company to succeed, she didn’t actually know him. Yes, they had been working together for a year, and she knew his work and his voice but they’d never met in person. It was his first start-up experience as well and now, as the only employee and key stakeholder, she recognized that how he reacted to the news and to his increased workload would affect the company going forward. Although she was the boss, Miriam saw that she needed Andre’s buy-in; she couldn’t succeed alone.

5. Scrutinize decision ownership.

Is it your decision to make? How much will you (or your organization) be impacted by the decision outcome? And how important is the decision to you (or your organization)?

Note: Impact and importance are not the same. Impact is the effect on someone or something; importance is the significance or value. A decision can have a significant impact but be of little importance, or vice versa. For example, if the head of sales decides to skip a sales team meeting, this decision may have a big impact on team members but may not actually be important if the meeting doesn’t require the head of sales to attend.

Miriam’s decision would have both impact and importance because the company was a small start-up. She told me that while “I fully own the decision to dissolve the partnership, the success of the company will depend on me communicating effectively with Andre about my reasons for this major decision. I realize that owning the decision doesn’t mean it only affects me. I have to let Andre know how much his contributions matter to the business, and to me. This relationship is important to my business success.”

6. Connect your situationality to your problem-solving profile.

Looking back at the five PSPs, how does your situationality connect to one of the blind spots in the profiles? For example, the blind spot of a listener is that they sometimes can’t hear their own voice because they’re focused on soliciting input from others. Try to stay focused on your behavior in the one situation that you’ve identified as problematic.

Although Miriam had identified herself as a listener, she realized that she’d made no time or space to listen to the co-workers in her start-up. She saw that she was making all the decisions. Looking back at the PSPs, Miriam realized that, in this work situation, she had been behaving like an adventurer.

7. Examine assumptions that haven’t served you well in decision-making.

Miriam realized that she was making two assumptions, both that fit the adventurer profile.

The first assumption was that her coworkers liked working independently, because that’s what was comfortable for her. “In a professional setting – particularly one where I’m in charge – I’m used to working on my own and making my own decisions rather than reaching out to others for their input,” she explained.

The second assumption was that, as a CEO, she thought she was supposed to make all the decisions. “I assumed that no news was good news, and that assumption turned out to be wrong.”

8. Recognize how your problem-solver profile can help you make more effective decisions.

While all PSP strengths provide solutions, returning to your dominant PSP can enable you to use strengths that you’ve already built as a decision-maker and initiate pathways where you’ve experienced success in the past.

Miriam realized that, in her situation as a CEO, she needed to bring forward her listener behavior. Better communication with her one employee wasn’t just “nice,” it was necessary. She knew she could be a good listener — that’s her dominant profile and that’s who she was with her friends. “I have the skills I need to improve my work relationship with Andre: curiosity, active listening, and trust building. I want to hear Andre’s ideas about the company. I’ll suggest we have a regular meeting where I can offer a company update to provide greater clarity and communication, and where I can listen to his ideas.”

Although Miriam was a listener in her personal life, in her professional life she thought listening wasn’t necessary — deciding was. In a lab, working on her own, her adventurer habits led to professional success and made what could have been a lonely job deeply satisfying. But those adventurer habits, while comfortable in a lab, were counterproductive in the collaborative world of a start-up. Further, with no real experience in behaving like a CEO, Miriam had fallen back on the decision-making style that worked in her previous professional experience: situationality had taken over.

By taking the time to look at a problematic work situation, Miriam was able to see something that was right in front of her but that her cognitive biases had blinded her to: She wasn’t listening to anyone. Miriam needed to bring her strong listener skills into her work world.

We like to think we are mindful of the world around us and that we will make the best decision in any situation, but situationality teaches us otherwise. Effective decision-making requires us to pause and ask the right questions about a situation. Taking the time to ponder these questions can show us the habits, cognitive biases, and patterns of decision-making that are getting in our way. Once these are revealed to us, we can work to remove them and make better decisions together.

Miriam and Andre now have a regular weekly meeting to discuss work and a monthly meeting focused on building their relationship. Whether it’s talking about a breakthrough in the science world or a book they’ve both read, taking the time to connect as people has been a win for both of them — and for the company.