How to Make Good Career Decisions

An old wives’ tale says that women, when making decisions, rely more on intuition, and that men, in similar situations, rely primarily on logic. But the truth is that all good decision-making requires an ever-shifting balance of intellectual and instinctual input. When it comes to career reinvention, your body is often your best guide to what you want to do or be. But your gut instinct isn’t infallible; it can be prone to bias because it draws upon your previous experiences—good, and not-so-good—to make a judgment call. The trick is to know when to trust it.

The June 2010 issue of the McKinsey Quarterly contains an article about how to test your decision-making instincts. Though the piece discusses the issue from the perspective of corporate leaders, their recommendations can also help you when making personal decisions. Here are their four tests to help you make sound decisions, along with my analysis of how to apply the tests to your career reinvention:

Test #1: The familiarity test. In this test, you must ask yourself how often you have experienced identical or similar situations. Familiarity is important because your subconscious relies on pattern recognition. You need to have enough data to support a pattern, and to ensure that the previous experience referenced by your subconscious is correct! The way you can judge this is by examining the “primary uncertainties” of a situation, and evaluating if you have enough experience to make an informed judgment call. In career reinvention, the big question is often whether or not a career will be a good fit. Perhaps your gut instinct is guiding you to become a coach. If that intuition is based upon your years of informally coaching your friends, you probably have enough data. If it’s based upon having a friend who’s a coach and loves it, you probably don’t.

Test #2: The feedback test. Here, you want to make sure that your takeaways from your previous experiences are, in fact, correct. As humans, our bias is to tag our decisions as good judgment, whether or not an independent assessment would support that. I quit my first job on Wall Street because I was desperately unhappy. At the time I thought it was a good decision—and it did, in the end, work out—but today I realize that it wasn’t so great (I was two months away from qualifying for a pension). To run this test, have a conversation with a friend or colleague. Tell them the experience your gut feelings are based on, and ask them for their honest feedback.

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Test #3: The measured-emotions test. Sometimes, your previous experiences are associated with highly charged emotions. When that happens, you run the risk of making an unbalanced decision. I had a client who was carrying baggage from a difficult experience with a former boss. When her new boss once made a similar comment, her gut instinct told her she had run across another boss-zilla. When you find yourself in these types of situations, you need help evaluating your emotions. Ask yourself if you are overreacting, or speak to an objective friend about your feelings.

Test #4: The independence test. Sometimes you have a personal interest in a particular outcome, and that bias will influence your gut feelings. I see this often; aspiring Reinventors frequently fall in love with a particular company, and swear their instincts are leading them in that direction. But many times the attachment is based upon other variables like an easier commute or friends who work at the firm. If you find your gut irresistibly draws you to a single target, turn to a Native to test your assumptions and get a balanced viewpoint.

The McKinsey article cautions that if a situation fails even one of the four tests, you must strengthen your decision-making process to minimize the risk of a negative outcome. If you find yourself in this situation, turn to friends or an informal advisory board for help vetting your career reinvention decision.