Marcia's Leadership Q and As: Make Better Decisions, Have Better Control!

Q. Making wise decisions in our teams is challenging. How can we have better control of our business?

A. There are multiple ways to make better decisions and secure better control of your business results. First (and this may sound easy, but it’s not), change your language. There are buzzwords that management and their staff have adopted that get you into trouble. Some are: empower, align, change, maximize, execute, arbitrary numerical goals. All of these come from linear thinking. Yet how people work together on processes and in organizations is non-linear. That means all the parts are interdependent, not in silos. That’s why it’s important to find the barriers and fears in your company and reduce them. A consultant with an objective perspective can assess and give you recommendations within a week.

Second, look at the decisions you make. What works, what doesn’t work? Do you make decisions too fast? Or too slow? Do you look at any data over time? Do you understand how the data are generated? What’s the context? Most often, people react to situations and make decisions too fast. Others are uncertain, have a fear of making mistakes or having failures; they take forever to make a decision. Look at your process for making decisions; improve your process. Make more and more decisions and see what you learn.

Third, when you are discussing solutions to problems, don’t start with ideas. Start brainstorming the questions you have, what you know, what you need to learn, and what you’re trying to solve and how it will make a difference. Then discuss possible options and ideas. Will those ideas address the symptoms to the problem or the root causes of the problem? The faster you discover the root causes and understand those, the faster you can solve a problem so it doesn’t keep recurring.