Like many young leaders, early in my career, I thought a great decision was one that attracted widespread approval. When my colleagues smiled and nodded their collective heads, it reinforced (in my mind, at least) that I was an excellent decision maker.

But as time wore on, I saw the fallacy of this approach. Seeking broad consensus requires considerable compromise to incorporate each person’s perspective. The result is a decision that is the lowest common denominator: a choice that everyone can live with, but no one is really happy with.

Worse, consensus-seeking is almost always excruciatingly slow, and the higher up a leader climbs, the less often they are afforded the luxury of time. During my years as a senior executive, I was regularly asked to make quick, critical decisions in response to sensitive events — a negative media story that required an immediate response, a procedural breach that was being investigated by regulators, a material change to financial guidance, a catastrophic asset failure, and so on.

What I found was that the decisions I made under pressure were at least as good, if not better than the ones that I spent days agonizing over.

This led me to ask myself two questions:

• Knowing that I can make good decisions under severe time pressure, what’s the DNA of those decisions — what actually makes them good?
• If I could be disciplined enough to impose my own time pressure on decision-making, could the resulting decisions be both faster and better?

I distilled my learnings into the eight elements that optimize both the speed and accuracy of my decisions. Over the last 10+ years of my corporate career, putting this philosophy into practice has helped me lift my leadership performance and greatly enhance the outcomes of my team.

The Eight Elements of a Great Decision

As a new leader, learning to make good decisions without hesitation or procrastination is a capability that can set you apart from your peers. While others vacillate on tricky choices, your team could be hitting deadlines and producing the type of results that deliver true value. That’s something that will get you — and the team — noticed.

The only surefire way to evaluate the efficacy of a decision is to assess the outcomes. You’ll discover, over time, whether a decision was good, bad, or indifferent. But if you rely only on retrospective analysis, the path to better decisions can be tenuous: Hindsight is incredibly prone to attribution bias.

That said, if you had a checklist of attributes to prospectively evaluate a decision (like the one provided below), you could predict in advance whether or not it is likely to be a good one. Based on my experience, these are the eight core elements of great decisions.

[Here are the first three.]

1) Great decisions are shaped by consideration of many different viewpoints.

While consensus-seeking should never be your goal, this doesn’t give you the freedom to act unilaterally. For a decision to be properly formed, you need to consult with those who can contribute in a meaningful way.

This doesn’t mean you should seek out everyone’s opinion. The right people with the relevant expertise need to clearly articulate their views to help the accountable decision-maker (aka you) broaden their perspective and make the best choice. Seeking valuable input is the primary source of healthy, robust debate. It will help you gain a greater understanding of the problem you are trying to solve and come up with smart, effective solutions.

2) Great decisions are made as close as possible to the action.

Who exactly should you seek feedback from before making a decision? People who have the most extensive knowledge, experience, and perspective on the issues at hand. This is generally someone who works at a lower level in the organization — not necessarily someone in the room where the decision is being made.

Remember that the most powerful people at your company are rarely on the ground doing the hands-on work. Seek input and guidance from team members who are closest to the action — and give them credit for actually making your decision a better one.

3) Great decisions address the root cause, not just the symptoms.

You may be wondering what kind of information you should seek out from your team members or colleagues. Often, when faced with a difficult problem, we focus on identifying the symptoms, not the core issue that caused the problem in the first place. If you do this, the same problem is sure to reappear down the road.

Although you may need to urgently address the symptoms, once this is done, you should always develop a plan to fix the root cause. Reaching out to people who are closest to the issue at hand will help you identify what this is. Use your time with them to gather that information.