Resolve Your Personal Dilemmas with Greater Confidence

WHILE we all seek expert advice to increase our chances of success, we also encounter situations in which no expert advice can uncover the right decision to make.

For example, expert advice can’t tell someone how to decide between a position in the public sector or a private sector position that pays more but serves the public interest less. Such decisions represent dilemmas — situations that involve competing goals, aspirations, and demands.

Moreover, dilemmas such as this career choice involve values and intrinsic motivations, which expert advice can’t address. An expert can’t tell you how to live out your values. Ultimately, only you can determine how to enact what you see as right, given your choices.

Arriving at the right answer in such dilemmas involves introspection. It requires examining your values and relying on your sense of personal judgment — not only weighing information and drawing conclusions, but also evaluating the ethical aspects of a situation.

A key means to enhance your personal judgment is to understand frames of reference, perspectives, and principles that can balance the competing — and potentially good — outcomes that compose a dilemma.

Employing these six questions enables you to capture perspectives that can enhance your personal judgment when addressing dilemmas:

What rules may be relevant to this dilemma?
What is the consequence I hope to see resulting from my decision?
What virtues (patience, courage, humility, etc.) are relevant to my decision, and what virtues do I want to develop and model through my choice?
What rights do the parties involved in the dilemma have, which must be respected? What rights do I have that must be respected?
What community values and traditions should my choice reflect or embody?
How will each possible course affect the relationships of those involved? What will build trust and fidelity, and what would erode these?

Let’s apply these questions to a specific dilemma: Imagine you are tasked with funding executive MBA programs for three employees in your firm. One employee, a rising star, has been accepted to an Ivy League program. Equipping this employee with a competitive MBA degree would assuredly be a financial benefit for your organization.

Two other long-term, loyal employees who you want to retain have been accepted into a local executive MBA program. Funding their MBAs will reward them for their engagement and commitment.

The cost of the Ivy League MBA program, however, translates to three executive MBA spots at the local institution, which is the amount your budget can cover. You face a dilemma: fund one high potential person and decline assistance to the two loyal, long-term employees, or reduce assistance to the rising star in order to fund all three.

As you apply each of the questions above to your dilemma, you consider:

What are the relevant rules? You must stay within your continuing education budget.
What consequences do you want to see from the decision? You wish to grow value for your firm while retaining all three executives.
What virtues are relevant to your decision? You hope to uphold fairness and honesty.
What rights may the parties involved have? Your MBA candidates deserve equal access to resources.
What community values and traditions should your choice embody? Your organization values loyalty and recognition.
How will each course of action affect relationships? Not funding each of the deserving employees will damage those relationships.

As you can see from this case, applying the questions intended to clarify your perspective leads you to conclude that privileging one individual with a degree at the expense of two other employees doesn’t uphold your organization’s values or the virtue of fairness. You resolve the dilemma by offering the employee accepted to the Ivy League program tuition assistance in the amount equivalent to full tuition at the local university, while also fully funding the two additional employees pursuing their MBAs locally.

This solution allows you to recognize the high potential of the one employee seeking the Ivy League degree and reward the loyalty of the two longer-term employees accepted to the local program. It also respects their right to equal access to company resources.

As this scenario illustrates, exploring a dilemma through six perspectives enables you to exercise refined personal judgment. (If you “pull back the curtain,” you’ll find that these six questions represent six types of philosophical ethical theories.)

Today, we’re increasingly expected to navigate gray areas in which expert advice doesn’t necessarily pertain. Applying the approach outlined here to refine personal judgment calls will help you master this crucial skill for success in business — and more broadly in your life.

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Haywood Spangler, Ph.D., M.Div., is the founder and principal of Work & Think, LLC. He helps clients make complex decisions that include a realistic understanding of uncertainty. His Spangler Ethical Reasoning Assessment® (SERA®) is used across industries and around the world, enabling individuals to combine critical thinking and values to make complex decisions. He’s a keynote speaker, a corporate consultant, a researcher, and an author. His book is Reasoning for Business: The Inquirer’s Guide to Decision Making (Routledge, Dec. 26, 2025). Learn more at haywoodspangler.com.

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