A-Z of Soft Skills: J is for Judgement

Judgment refers to a person’s ability to make considered decisions or come to sensible conclusions based on the facts, resources and constraints of the here and now.

The inimitable Warren Buffet said famously, after he lost one billion dollars from the collapse of Tesco: "In life you only need to make a few good decisions, so long as you don’t make too many bad ones." Good judgment is a soft skill that helps people make good decisions. It turns information into knowledge and lets a person find patterns and motifs in seemingly unrelated data.

Fundamentally, we make three types of Judgement:

Value judgments are based on the principles and beliefs we hold as standards for our lives and the morality and ethics we would like to retain and preserve in our families, work-atmosphere and societies. Here we apply a “rule” or a “norm” that exists and is valued.

Reality judgments attempt to make objective and balanced determinations of the course a particular event will take in reality or the consequences of an action based on the environment and information available to us and our sense of the relevance of such environment or information to the decision.

Action judgments answer the question, “So what do we do about this?” after the issue is defined by our “value” and “real” judgments. Good action judgments re-imagine possibilities and practicalities and do not rely simply on what has been done in the past in such situations.

To develop a good sense of judgment, it is important for us to:

• be self-aware and examine our prejudices and gaps in knowledge
• acknowledge our errors and take ownership of mistakes we have made in the past 
• learn from them 
• start again from point one

The author, Dr. Ranee Kaur Banerjee consults under the brand Expressions@Work to create and deliver learning and development programs in communication and soft skills.