1. The Need

Decision making is the skill set of successful executives and managers. Decisions are the critical starting point of any and all actions that propel companies forward. 

In fact, a company’s (or your business unit, or P&L center or department) performance is the sum total of decisions each person makes on its behalf. So decision making is key.

If you’re wondering where you sit on the decision making spectrum, ask yourself if you ever find yourself running into these roadblocks or symptoms of bad decision making.

2. The Symptoms Of Poor Decision Making

A. Rely only on gut instinct and judgement?

B. Debate alternatives absent of any criteria?

C. Delay critical decisions in hope that things get better?

D. Frustrated with how long it takes to make decisions

E. Second guessing decisions you have made?

If any of these sound like you there is one solution you can begin to use now to become a better decision maker?

3. Solution: HAVE A DECISION MAKING PROCESS

A sound decision making process has three steps – each step can as simple or as robust as you want – it depends on the type and scope of the decision you are making. But to get you started to having a process that you can use immediately and with colleagues here are the four parts of a decision

Step 1: State the Purpose – this is a concise 5-10word statement that articulates the ultimate aim or outcome of what you are trying to do.

Select Sales Rep to Hire for Zone 6

Key tip – words matter, and within every statement is a set of decisions already made i.e. Hire not outsource, Zone 6 not Zone 7

Step 2: Set and Weigh Objectives or Requirements – these are criteria that any alternatives will be evaluated against – the weight are you thinking or gut feel for relative importance

Key tip – All the criteria can’t be the same weight – you need to weight the 10’s – most important and then relative to the 10 calibrate from there – and you can have criteria with the same weights

Step 3: Generate and Evaluate Alternatives – these are options that will be scored against how they best satisfy your requirements or criteria. Each alterative needs to be score on the same scale (10-0, 5-0, etc) and they you simplify multiply the Weight X Score for each and total them up to get an overall performance against objectives. 

Key tip – Picking the alternative with the “highest” total is not the point of making using a process – it’s not just the math!  It’s being able to step back from analysis and understand why the scores unfolded this way.

In the case above the summary is – Jim scores higher because he wants less money and has stronger communication skills and can start when you want. Whereas Bill wants more money, have a better track record but wants to start at a later date the end of this – you still need to make a choice – but you have clarity on the performance of each alternative. Rather than trying to do “mental gymnastics”

Summary Takeaways

To become a better decision maker you need to have a repeatable, flexible, scalable and transportable process for decisions -  and the one I outlined above  meets all those criteria.  Whether you use it on a napkin, back of the envelope or detailed spreadsheet is up to you – but you must employ these three steps to become a better decision maker –

Tim Lewko is CEO of Thinking Dimensions, a professional services firm with offices in 16 countries that advises clients on the big decisions relevant to their future success. If you would like to comment or learn more feel free to visit the company blog where there are more than 80 topics discussed as well as complimentary white papers and interesting downloads.