Difficult Decisions: How Leaders Make the Right Call with Insight, Integrity, and Empathy

What do you do when the algorithm doesn’t have the answer?  Countless tools and frameworks claim to make decisions objective and bias-free. But in reality, the defining decisions that leaders face are complex ones with subjective information sources and conflicting courses of action. That’s why the toughest choices are left to the leaders, and that’s why formulas won’t answer them.  In Difficult Decisions: How Leaders Make the Right Call with Insight, Integrity, and Empathy, leadership expert and CEO of YSC Consulting, Eric Pliner, delivers a set of practical tools for readers to make sense of these complex, subjective decisions quickly and with integrity. It presents a path to understanding your own subjectivity, and how your morals, ethics, and responsibilities affect how leaders make the most important decisions.   Difficult Decisions is ideal for executives, managers, and business leaders to examine their own intuition and navigate the most conflicted choices they make. It’s a challenging read and an indispensable resource to help readers develop self-reflection, clarify their values, and ultimately make the choice that is most “right” to them.  

Table of Contents:
Preface: Writing Wrong xi Chapter 1 Difficult Decisions 1 Making Difficult Decisions 8 How We Make Decisions Now 11 Key Points 22 Chapter 2 The Moral–Ethical–Role Responsibility Triangle 23 Morals versus Ethics: Election 27 Jean and Paula 29 Win as Much as You Can 32 Do the Right Thing 41 Key Points 42 Chapter 3 Morals 43 Communicating Your Morality and Asking about Morality 47 Knowing the Sources of Your Morality 54 Reflecting on the Sources of Your Morality 55 Understanding the Parameters and Boundaries of Your Morality 56 A Moral Exercise 67 Exercise: Morality and Your Leadership Narrative 70 Key Points 73 Chapter 4 Ethics 75 Characteristics of Ethics 77 Ethics Are Contextually Dependent and Are, Therefore, Not Uniform 77 Ethics Can Change over Time 81 Ethics Are about Shared Social Acceptability, but They Are Not about Popularity 83 The Ethics of Leading Politically 92 Waiving Ethics 95 An Exercise in Exceptions 98 Ethics and Judgment 100 An Ethics Exercise 102 Key Points 111 Chapter 5 Role Responsibilities 113 Who You Are Charged to Serve 117 Stakeholder Mapping 118 Socioemotional Role 121 Understanding Dynamic Roles 128 A Role Exercise 137 Key Points 145 Chapter 6 Using the Triangle to Make Difficult Decisions 147 Decision-Making Ecosystem and Its Associated Expectations 148 Thoughtful Learning and Development for the Leader 149 The Importance of Deep Consideration of What Truly Matters to Us 149 What and How to Communicate to Audiences with Varied Needs and Perspectives 150 The Tissue Test 153 Key Points 161 Chapter 7 I Think I Know What I Think; Now What? 163 A Decision-Making Process 164 A View, a Voice, a Vote, or a Veto 180 A View 181 A Voice 182 A Vote 182 A Veto 183 Delegating 184 Facts versus Feelings 186 Tools and Muscles 187 Key Points 190 Afterword 191 Acknowledgments 193 About the Author 197 Index 199

About the Author :
ERIC PLINER is Chief Executive Officer of YSC Consulting, a global leadership strategy consultancy head-quartered in London. His writing on leadership development, organizational culture, education and training, and strategic diversity and inclusion has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Forbes, and Fast Company. Eric is a member of the Dramatists’ Guild of America and lives in Brooklyn, New York.