Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Richard Branson for LinkedIn Pulse. To read the complete article, check out others, and sign up for email alerts, please click here.

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In the How I Lead series, professionals explain how to lead in times of turmoil or growth. Read the posts, then write your own (use #HowILead in the body of your post). Here are Branson’s observations:

One of the most important skills any leader can learn is when to be decisive, and when to take a step back and look at the wider picture before making the big calls.

In times of turmoil, excitement, rapid growth, or crisis, there will be more decisions to make than usual and less time to make them. There will also be an almost irresistible temptation to make these decisions as quickly as possible. A leader must be calm, confident in his choices, visible to his team and their customers, and in control of the situation.

However, this doesn’t mean rushing in and jumping to rash conclusions before knowing all the facts. I recently read a story about the businessman Stephen Covey’s lasting lesson: seek first to understand, then to be understood. He tells the sweet tale of a little girl holding two apples. Her mother comes in and asks her for one of the apples. The girl looks up at her mum and takes a bite of one apple, then the other. The mum looks disappointed at her daughter’s selfishness. Then the little girl gives one of her bitten apples to her mum, and says: “Mummy, here you are. This is the sweeter one.”

Even when we think we know all of the facts and figures, and have viewed every angle of a given scenario, the truth about a situation can be a big surprise. This is one of the things that make life so exciting — just when we think we understand something, we learn something new.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Richard Branson is Founder at Virgin Group. To learn more about him, please click here.