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Making Your Decision Making Much More Effective

Written by: Martin Haworth

Article Overview: As managers, we make decisions all the time. Some are perfect and others, well, maybe 'could do better'. So, how can we all make better decisions then...

Making Your Decision Making Much More Effective

Part of our being as managers is to make the decisions we have to and be the best we can as much of the time as possible. The job is about being mostly where the 'buck stops' - so it's down to us! Fortunately, the decisions we make are often successful and we can benefit from those right decisions, most of the time.

Our reputation and trust comes from the way we go about making the decisions we do, and when we have the opportunity we learn, so that we can always be better next time.

As our experience grows, we generally get better at creating outcomes that are the right ones - and ones that come from our capacity to be correct pretty much most of the time.

When we get things wrong we often are able, through understanding potential downsides, just what it is that we can do to hedge disasters, by the safety features we put in place.

Organizations generally train us to minimize the failures - and in the older style command and control cultures, they would almost beat you with a stick when it went wrong.

Nowadays, organizations that are often more enlightened and will let you make mistakes and take risks. They are more keen to encourage innovation and have recognized that they need to be more generous with failure in an age where creativity is having its day.

Decisions still need to be right more of the time than they are wrong. So it's important to know what can you do to make decisions effectively - getting them more right than wrong.

The key here is to create an intelligence gathering capacity that is effective. By being good at understanding the appropriate level of information you need.

Appropriate for managers making decisions means (a bit like the 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears' story!)...

• Not too much - or they never decide
• Not too little - or the risk of making the wrong decision is too great
• Just enough - as a balance between overkill and hence prevarication or insufficient, will enable effective decisions to be made

For each of us as managers, we have our own fault line where we find our comfort zones as we make decisions.

We must not hedge making them, or risk seriously frustrating our people. We must try to get most decisions right, or become tarnished with the failure brush. We can allow ourselves fail sometimes too these days, with enough safety features such that we don't bring the walls down.

Decisions are what we get paid for doing as we manage, it's simply a case of getting the best level of information to make them right, most of the time and learn for ourselves how to emulate the last time, as we progress each time round the loop.

Related Articles
  Effective Decision Making
  Becoming a Decision Manager
  Top Effective Decision Making Tactics For Managers
  MIND TRAP: Heuristic Thinking
  Involving your Team in Decisions

Article Tags: decision making, decisions, effective decision making, management development, managers making decisions



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