Decision-making and peer influence

neerajmotivation (40)in #life • 6 years ago

Image Source: https://quotefancy.com/decision-quotes

Recently, a young person (let’s call her “Kamya”) known to me needed to decide on which organization to join for her MBA internship. Since she had not taken any action earlier on to find out what all options were available to her, and due to lack of remaining time in which to finish the internship, she was left with only a couple of options to choose from. One option was to join an organization in her hometown (a rather small town with not many organizations and a slim possibility of any real learning happening) and the other option was to join an organization which was located in Delhi and was of a substantial size and which seemed to be more promising.

Well, Kamya, who happens to belong to a somewhat traditional Indian family (the kind where girls quite often tend not to have much autonomy and, thus, are not used to making their own decisions) decided to join the organization in Delhi. She finally left for Delhi along with a couple of her family members to help her seek a place to stay and to do a general check upon the organization and its environment.

After travelling in a car for about 5 hours or so, Kamya along with her family members finally reached the destination. Later in the day when I called up one of her family members to enquire if everything went well and as per the plan, he told me that she returned to her hometown without joining the organization! On hearing this, I was totally taken aback and asked him about what actually happened and why she decided to come back. He shared with me that three of her friends had promised her that they would also be joining the same organization but they withdrew at the very last minute and did not inform her about the change of their decision. Since Kamya was really banking on their presence in braving this new big city and organization, she immediately became panicky and confused as to what to do and in that confusion decided to come back to her hometown.

After returning home, she was again in turmoil as she needed to do her internship somewhere. So, she called me up to discuss the whole thing. I shared with her that this decision could have been made in a much better manner; she could have sought advice from people she trusts and then could have based her decision on that information and advice and her own understanding and intuition. This could have saved a lot of time, money and chaos for her and her family.

I shared with her now that she is in college and will shortly be joining some company and working as a professional, she might want to work on her decision-making skills. Rather than making decisions entirely based on and influenced by what her friends and peers are doing, she needs to analyse them from the standpoint that it’s her future work life and what would be better for her.

A good thing to do would be to get ideas and suggestions from a bunch of people who are already working in the industry and whose advice she can truly bank on and then form an opinion of her own and take full responsibility for whatever choice she eventually makes. Nobody can guarantee that a particular decision is going to be 100% correct. Decision-making essentially involves a certain amount of risk and a possibility of failure as well as success. We just need to understand and accept that and make well-informed decisions by collecting the right kind of information from the right kind of sources. If in retrospect, you find that your decision was the right one for you, celebrate and be happy and, in case, it turns out that it wasn’t a very good decision for you then also be happy that you dared to make a decision of your own and learn whatever lesson you can from it.

Based on the above advice, Kamya chose to go back to Delhi and joined the same organization for her internship and this time she did not worry about whether her friends are joining her there or not. From my last call with her, I came to know she seems to be doing fine there and is happy about her decision. I am very happy for her and really hope that she learned a very important life lesson from it about decision-making.