Are Your Managers Making Good Business Decisions?

A post from our Leadership blog

While many companies focus on training their managers (and rightly so) in such areas as Coaching and Delegation, the one topic that often gets overlooked is possibly the most important. It is Decision Making. While a manager might know how to coach his/her staff and effectively delegate, do you know if they are actually making the best decisions on behalf of the company?



In an article on errors in the aviation industry, mistakes that usually resulted in serious consequences were from errors with decision making rather than compliance oversights. An example is the decision to fly through a storm rather than around it. This would have more serious consequences than a compliance issue like forgetting to offer duty free items.

Similarly, a manager within your company making poor decisions might have more serious consequences than another manager that might not be able to coach. This could be from a sales manager making strategic decisions to focus on the wrong products, to procurement managers choosing to purchase from the wrong supplier and lawsuits result.

The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) found in a survey that 74% of respondents regularly had to make decisions at work that they did not actually feel they had the ability to make. However, while knowing that they do not have the skills to make these decisions because of a variety of reasons, many of these respondents felt that they could not approach their bosses about this very problem.

So, when did you last look at your managers' decision making abilities? With the potential for so much to go wrong, is it not worth looking at a small amount of training so that they have a systematic way of looking at each decision so cutting costs happens? Almost without fail, feedback from people that have undergone such training have given feedback on instances where saving money has either happened or cutting costs occurred after a very short time of receiving training. Are these not the things that you want your managers to be doing for you? In tough economic climates, every aspect should be considered about how saving money can be achieved.

SOURCES

Helmreich, R.L. "On error management: lessons from aviation." British medical Journal, March 2000, pp. 781-785 www.hrmagazine.co.uk Article posted by David Woods on 17 June 2011.