As a leader, your reputation is, in essence, the sum of your collective decisions. Basically, you’re paid to decide—it’s that simple. You likely make hundreds of decisions every week, some insignificant and others so impactful they could change the course of your entire organization. Leaders decide:

•Who to hire and who to fire.

•What to elevate as a priority and what to push aside.

•What to celebrate and what to ignore.

•What gets funded and what gets starved.

I've come to think of high-value decisions as the actions that bring disproportionate progress toward the organization's mission, vision, and WIGs. It might be something client-focused, cost-focused, performance-focused, innovation-focused… the options are limitless. And therein lies the challenge. If you're looking to move from mess to success in this regard, assess how you spend your time, even on a daily and hourly basis. Ask yourself, “Is what I am doing now, or what I am going to do next, progressing our mission and vision or our Wildly Important Goals?”

Making such decisions involves carrying a lot of responsibility. I’ve seen very competent, well-respected people with admirable work ethics and high character make decisions that cost their organizations millions of wasted dollars and irreparably injured their careers. I struggled with this early in my career. I didn’t waste millions of dollars, but I’m certain my reputation took a hit.

After a successful tenure running the company’s largest sales region from Chicago, I accepted a position at the company headquarters in Salt Lake City. When you get feedback as a sales leader, it’s quick and never wrong—you either hit your number or you didn’t. When I arrived at my new office in Utah, I had a swagger, an inflated ego, and believed I could do no wrong. Who wouldn’t be excited to work with this level of management mess, right?

My new job involved expanding the client-facilitator channel for the organization—no more revenue spreadsheets with my name on them. Since I was the first person in the role, there were no previous failures or successes to be measured against. It was as “blue ocean” an opportunity as I ever had up to that point in my career. Each workday amounted to endless opportunities, prompting a countless number of possible decisions. With an office just down the hall from the CEO and uncharted territory for me to explore and build, this should have been a slam-dunk, hole-in-one, I-just-stretched-my-t-shirt-in-a-bicep-curl kind of moment.

Only it wasn’t.

Without the constant feedback and tension of revenue goals, I struggled to prioritize my time. I focused on projects that made me feel good and validated my own biases on what needed to be accomplished but weren’t likely of the highest value to the company. No one would say I was wasting resources or being irrelevant—I was working harder than ever. But what I was working on wouldn’t have been viewed by the CEO as the most important areas of focus. Without the benefit of the mutual, robust collaboration I had grown accustomed to in Chicago, I made many decisions on my own, few of which I’d categorize as high-value.

I’ve come to think of high-value decisions as the actions that bring disproportionate progress toward the organization’s mission, vision, and WIGs. It might be something client-focused, cost-focused, performance-focused, innovation-focused… the options are limitless. And therein lies the challenge. If you’re looking to move from mess to success in this regard, assess how you spend your time, even on a daily and an hourly basis. Ask yourself, “Is what I am doing now, or what I am going to do next, progressing our mission and vision or our Wildly Important Goals?” In The 5 Choices: The Path to Extraordinary Productivity, the authors write that high-value decisions result from:

•Working on the important, not the urgent—going for the extraordinary, not the ordinary.

•Focusing one’s attention on the right things—how leaders prioritize and manage their time.

•Having sustained energy. Leaders who burn out and don’t renew their energy won’t have the capacity to recognize and drive high-value decisions to completion.

In addition, I’ve discerned that making high-value decisions requires first admitting that it’s okay if you don’t have the answer. Help build the kind of trust with your leader that allows you to share what you’re working on and get input on how to organize and prioritize your time. I have three “lessons learned” from my experience with high-value decisions: