The Decision-Maker's Guide: Practical Tips and Strategies

Welcome to the first Elevate Newsletter by Effective Flow Connections (EFC)! If you are just getting to know us, we are a management consulting company dedicated to enhancing organizational efficiency and effectiveness. We specialize in providing customized solutions to meet the unique needs of our clients, with a strong emphasis on practical, results-driven strategies. Some of the services we offer include process improvement, project management, change management, organizational design, strategic planning, system implementation, and employee development through coaching or training. If you’d like to know more about us, please visit us here. You can also follow us on YouTube.

In these newsletters, we’re hoping to give you practical and tactical tips to elevate your team and organization. As long-time decision-makers and consultants, we’ve learned a few things about how to make high-impact decisions, but we didn’t always know how to get in there and start deciding. This is why we are focusing our first newsletter on all things decision-making. We know we’re not alone. McKinsey?research shows that executives, on average, spend almost

40 percent of their time making decisions and believe most of that time is poorly used.

That’s a tough statistic when many of these decisions impact people, companies, and bottom lines.?It took resources to shape our decision-making prowess and we plan to share many of them with you here. Join us as we investigate current research, inspired thinkers in the space, and actionable tips to help you approach your next big decision from steady footing.

What’s Inside This Elevate Newsletter?

Articles We’re Loving:

• How to Make Great Decisions, Quickly, an article by Martin G. Moore
• Who Has the D?: How Clear Decision Roles Enhance Organizational Performance, an article by Paul Rogers and Marcia W. Blenko
• Making Better Decisions, a McKinsey breakdown

Books on Our Shelf:

• Good Decisions Equal Success, by Kandis Porter and Damon Lembi
• Decisive; How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, by Chip & Dan Heath
• Predictably Irrational; The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, by Dan Ariely
• Thinking Fast & Slow, by Daniel Kahneman

Articles We’re Loving:

How to Make Great Decisions, Quickly

If you want to be a leader, you must learn how to make the right decision, even if it isn’t the popular one. In this article, author Martin G. Moore developed his “eight elements” of great decision-making based on his own on-the-ground experimentation. Early in his career he used to think a good decision was one that got easy consensus, but as he rose up the corporate ranks he started to understand a few key things:

• High-pressure decisions often require immediate action.
• The quick decisions he was making were usually as good, if not better, than the ones he agonized over. And;
• Popularity isn’t important, but understanding which voices in the room matter is.

“Seeking broad consensus requires considerable compromise to incorporate each person’s perspective. The result is a decision that is the lowest common denominator: a choice that everyone can live with, but no one is really happy with.” – Martin G. Moore

Moore set out to understand his own decision-making, at its best, and developed his eight-element rubric for great decisions. According to Moore, great decisions are:

1. Shaped by consideration of many different viewpoints.
2. Made as close as possible to the action.
3. Address the root cause, not just the symptoms.
4. Made by a clearly accountable person.
5. Consider the holistic impacts of a problem.
6. Balance short-term and long-term value.
7. Communicated well to stakeholders.
8. Timely.

By using these eight elements to evaluate your decision-making process, Moore believes young leaders can learn to make better decisions faster. This skill, all by itself, will set a leader apart from their peers. Decisiveness is rare. Decisiveness coupled with good decision-making skills, is even rarer.

Who Has the D?: How Clear Decision Roles Enhance Organizational Performance, by Paul Rogers and Marcia W. Blenko

“Every success, every mishap, every opportunity seized or missed is the result of a decision that someone made or failed to make.” – Rogers & Blenko

No matter what you do, where you work, or what level of achievement you’ve risen to, the ability to make decisions quickly and effectively—and to execute those decisions once they’re made—is often the difference between success and failure.

Authors Rogers and Blenko surveyed over 350 global companies to find out what set them apart from their competitors. What they found? The true top performing companies also had systems in place to make fast, high-quality decisions, both when it came to major strategic decisions and critical operating decisions.

However, even among these top performers, there were still tug-of-war spots where most organizations get stuck when it comes to deciding quickly. These are:

• Global versus local
• Center versus business unit
• Function versus function
• Inside versus outside partners

To help organizations clear these bottlenecks, the authors developed an approach to easily clarify decision roles and assign responsibilities. They call their approach RAPID, an acronym for the primary roles in the decision-making process: recommend, agree, perform, input, and decide. Each of these roles must be defined and adhered to when making high-impact decisions. Who are the stakeholders most suited to provide recommendations? Whose sign-off is required to move forward? Who is going to execute the decision once made? Who is well-seated to give additional input, and who is the final decision-maker?

Knowing these roles won’t solve everything but will provide a solid foundation to start thinking through and creating systems so a company can stand out instead of getting sucked into the quicksand of indecision.

Making Better Decisions, McKinsey

This special collection on decision-making, culled from McKinsey research, is a great resource when it comes to making faster, better decisions. They’ve put together a series of articles and advice on:

• Empowering employees to make smarter choices
• Making decisions amid uncertainty
• Using meeting planning to improve decision-making
• Eliminating bias to make clearer decisions

Check out all their linked articles to start taking your decision-making from slow to go, and learn how to be a more effective and decisive leader in your organization.

Books On Our Shelf:

Good decision-making is a vital skill—that most of us never learned.?In?Good Decisions Equal Success, we cover in-depth how to make better decisions more quickly and with greater confidence. We describe decision-making roles and common pitfalls, then outline a process to help guide you.

Want to know all the ins and outs of our decision-making process? Check out our book, Good Decisions Equal Success: Stop Decision Anxiety and Start Taking Action, by Kandis Porter and Damon Lembi.

Additional Recommended Readings: To further support your growth, we recommend diving into these three insightful books on decision-making:

1.????? Decisive; How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, by Chip & Dan Heath: The Heath brothers provide a four-step process to overcome common decision-making biases. This book is packed with actionable strategies and real-world examples to help you make more informed and confident choices.?

2.????? Predictably Irrational; The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, by Dan Ariely: Behavioral economist Dan Ariely reveals the hidden forces that lead us to make irrational decisions. Through engaging experiments and insights, this book helps you understand the patterns behind your choices and how to make better, more rational decisions.?

3.????? Thinking Fast & Slow, by Daniel Kahneman: Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman takes you on a groundbreaking tour of the mind, explaining the two systems that drive the way we think. Learn how biases and heuristics affect your decisions and how to harness both fast and slow thinking for better outcomes.

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