Build your team's decision making muscle, build long term value
Every company’s value is in essence built through the culmination of all the decisions made by you and your team up to any given point. Therefore, the better you and your team are at making decisions, generally the greater value, or company worth, that you’ve created.
Why is it then that every company isn’t world class at making efficient, effective decisions? You’d think building a strong decision-making muscle would be an ongoing focus at every business. Sit with the key members of your leadership team and ask this question – “how good are we at making important business decisions every day? Are we efficient and effective in making mostly good decisions?” You might find an interesting and productive discussion will follow. Here are some additional questions around decision-making:
- What degree of empowerment do we give key managers around the company to make decisions on their own?
- Do we ever go back and evaluate key business decisions we’ve made to learn what we did that may have made it a good process and ultimate decision and perhaps what didn’t?
- Would our customers say that the employees they interface with at our company are empowered to make certain decisions directly and quickly or will customers say we are slow in getting them decisions on even basic items and they find this frustrating?
- Does our organization structure enable and support efficient and effective decision making or is it a disabler to time efficient and good decision making?
- When bigger decisions need to be made, do we have an effective, repeatable process we work through so we don’t reinvent the wheel each time we need to make an important decision?
Here is a great template to have as part of your company decision-making muscle, especially for the bigger more important decisions that need to be made (Decision Making Template). Each time you have an important decision to make, run through this template and let it facilitate productive dialog with your team. Building your decision-making muscle will help build long term company net worth, so begin enhancing that muscle today.
