Decision Making Tips for New Managers: The Top Five

Making the Right Decision — Decision Making Tips for New Managers
When you step into a management role, the pressure to prove your value can be intense. Many new managers feel compelled to make bold, highly visible decisions early on. Yet decades of research on decision-making for new leaders show a consistent risk: acting too quickly often leads to misjudging strategic priorities, situational dynamics, core processes, key people, and the unwritten rules of organizational politics.

The most effective new managers do the opposite. They deliberately slow down. For the first 30–90 days, they prioritize listening, observing, and learning over immediate action.

Yes, some decisions are unavoidable — a clear operational issue, a compliance concern, or a true crisis may require swift action. But most leadership decisions are far more complex. They involve:

• Multiple stakeholders.
• Competing interests
• Long-term consequences that are difficult to reverse.

Not surprisingly, participants in new-manager training consistently report the same concern: early on, they rarely feel confident predicting which decision will produce the best outcome over time. That uncertainty is not a weakness. It is a signal to gather better data, build context, and make more informed choices before locking in decisions that shape credibility, culture, and results.

5 Decision Making Tips for New Managers

Once you know that you have a decision to make, here are some decision making tips for new managers from a recent decision making training workshop that can help :

1. Agree Upon the Levels of Importance, Urgency, and Risk
   Before gathering data or allocating resources, the most effective leaders align on three fundamentals: importance, urgency, and risk.

   They clarify who will be affected and how. They determine where the decision truly sits among competing priorities. They surface and assess the key risks — including what could go wrong if the decision is delayed or made incorrectly. And they define the time horizon within which a decision must be made to avoid unnecessary cost or disruption.

   When these elements are agreed upon upfront, teams make better tradeoffs, avoid false urgency, and focus their energy where it matters most.

2. Define Your Decision Making Criteria
   Once the broader context is clear, the next step is to identify and prioritize the factors that should guide the decision. Strong leaders are explicit about their decision-making criteria rather than relying on intuition or personal preference. The criteria should be measurable, clearly defined, and directly tied to your strategy, culture, team capabilities, and the scope of the problem you are solving.

   Well-designed decision criteria typically span multiple dimensions. These often include ease of implementation, financial impact, scalability, timing, quality, flexibility, and risk. Equally important are people and culture implications, customer impact, competitive considerations, and the organization’s readiness to absorb change.

   By agreeing on the criteria upfront, teams reduce bias, improve alignment, and increase the likelihood that the final decision delivers both near-term results and long-term value.

3. Gather Relevant Information
   Once your decision-making criteria are clear, it becomes the new manager’s responsibility to ensure that the right information is gathered to support an informed, timely, and effective decision. Use every credible source available — knowledgeable colleagues, relevant data and reports, past experience, and emerging trends.

   Recognize that a current-state analysis will rarely produce perfect or complete information. In most situations, the data will not point to a single, obvious path forward. The goal is not certainty; it is clarity. Focus on narrowing the field by eliminating options that are clearly misaligned with your criteria, strategy, or values.

   To move forward despite ambiguity, leaders make thoughtful strategic, cultural, and people-related assumptions. These assumptions should be explicit, not implicit. Finally, document the most critical information gaps that remain. Doing so helps you understand the level of risk you are carrying and signals where further learning or course correction may be required.

4. Identify Viable Alternatives and Consequences
   Guide your team to develop at least three or four realistic alternatives before settling on a course of action. For each option, explicitly assess the advantages, disadvantages, uncertainties, and likely consequences — both intended and unintended.

   While generating multiple alternatives may feel like it slows momentum, it actually improves decision quality. Expanding the set of options forces teams to challenge assumptions, surface blind spots, and view the problem from multiple angles rather than defaulting to the most familiar solution.

   Among decision-making tips for new managers, this discipline consistently reduces the stress of choosing. When leaders and teams can see clear alternatives and understand the tradeoffs of each, the final decision feels less like a leap of faith and more like a deliberate, defensible choice.

5. Be Decisive
   Once the viable options have been evaluated, it is time to decide. Thoughtful consideration matters — hesitation does not. Avoid the decision trap of endlessly revisiting options in search of certainty.

   For complex decisions, a “perfect” answer rarely exists. Effective leaders make the best possible choice with the information available, commit to a direction, and create forward momentum.

   Decisiveness does not mean rigidity. Put simple mechanisms in place to monitor progress, test assumptions, and adjust course as new information emerges. Moving forward with discipline and learning is almost always better than standing still in pursuit of perfection.

The Bottom Line
As a new manager, expectations are high — and so is the impact of your decisions. Trust is built early, not by having all the answers, but by demonstrating sound judgment, clarity, and follow-through. Invite input and listen carefully to your team’s perspective. Then own the decision. Accountability ultimately rests with you, and decisive leadership is what turns collective insight into results.

To learn more about how to create the environment for good decision making, download 3 Proven Steps to Set Your Team Up to Make Better Decisions

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.