A630.4.4.RB - How Companies Can Make Better Decisions

Listening to the video, How Companies Can Make Better Decisions, Faster, everything Marcia had to say kind of made the light bulb go on for me as far as understanding a bit better on how some companies have great success whereas others not so much.  Employee engagement and how it relates to decision effectiveness can be as simple as decisions that are made that are sound and well thought out but not drawn out.  When leaders make clear and concise decisions employees will feel that leaders are making these decisions with them in mind and it makes for a better working environment as well.  Making decisions should be easier not harder and this in turn will make for a more interesting place to work. 

If you have a board or committee of leaders who make the decisions for the organization as a whole and they can’t seem to agree or be on the same page or they want to involve too many people, it slows down progress across the organization.  It makes you wonder what is going on.  I experienced this when I was on a board last year and we had 10 people on the committee and our job was to make the verification process smoother and the forms more user friendly.  The problem was that there were about 6 people too many on this committee and 4 of them had not done a verification in many years if at all, so the changes they wanted to implement would actually make the process harder for the employees and less user friendly for the students and parents.

In the end the employees were frustrated because they were not asked their thoughts on the forms and there should have been at least one counselor on the committee to help since they are on the front lines every day with students and parents answering questions.  If a decision is made quickly and effectively everyone will feel that they are being heard and processes can be implemented faster and the flow is smoother which leads to more productivity for everyone involved.

Some impediments to good decision making that Marcia listed in the video include not having the right talent in key decision roles and leadership behavior getting in the way because there is no open and constructive debates before the decision is made.  So if you have leaders who just want to implement decisions and do not take a little bit of time to actually think about how these decisions can affect the bottom line, there may end up being more talk after the decision has been implemented and doesn’t work. This cause more issues such as a possibility of going back to the drawing board, retracting that decision which may have customers, employees, board members, etc. questioning the leadership ability or the company’s strategy.  Marcia also pointed out that companies are becoming more complex with more companies evolving to reach more markets so they become more complicated.  Organization charts look more like road maps these days so it is hard to keep it simple sometimes.

            In addition to the 4 elements that Blenko suggests (quality, speed, yield and effort) I would add strategy, alternatives, reasoning, and feedback.  Strategy is important because as companies evolve and change, products improve or customer demands change it becomes important that your strategy is well thought out and you are prepared for changes that will happen.  Alternatives would be great to have in place if a decision is made and for some reason it doesn’t work or needs to be tweaked you have back up plan.  So if Plan A doesn’t work then Plan B can be put into play.  This would work well in the planning part of the decision making. Reasoning is important for the simple fact of asking ourselves why we are doing this.  What is the reason we need to make these decisions?  Why didn’t it work before?  Feedback would go well with Alternatives because if you can get feedback on what worked and what did not you can then make necessary changes that are needed in order to implement more effective decisions.

            What I can take away from this exercise is that decisions affect each department as well as the organization as a whole so these decisions need to contain the 4 elements that Blenko mentions such as quality, speed, yield, and effort as well as incorporating the ones I listed.  Our department is smaller and it is easier to have everyone involved to hear ideas and thoughts on how implementing new processes will affect the students as well as the counselors.  Some decisions are out of our control as they come from changes with Federal Regulations however we can be sure that we are getting that information out to our students and parents in a timely manner and that it is done in a way that makes sense and encourages them to ask questions.