Making Better Choices

One has to like the Harvard Business Review, all the charm of PBS with the glamour of C-SPAN to really drive it home. All snarky comments aside the Business Review offers insightful and useful information. In this week it is an interview with a leadership professional and consultant named Marcia Blenko who offers some of her take on leadership and decision making.

Marcia Blenko argues that decision effectiveness correlates positively with employee engagement and organizational performance. How do you think that employee engagement relates to decision effectiveness?

I think people like being part of a winning team. Additionally, companies get better results with an inclusive decision making process. This can become a cycle of positivity where good choices bring better performance and then inspire more inclusion. When working with patients in recovery it is stressed that plan needs to be patient's plan and not one just given to the patient. The same works for providers as well. Give providers a buy-in to the plan and the plan becomes better. Additionally, this imparts a sense of ownership between the plan or decision and the affected parties.

What are some impediments to good decision making?

Leadership is a learned art. There are very few natural, charismatic leaders that can inspire people to great works and even those sometimes have tragic ends; Joan of Ark comes to mind. A gifted orator may not make a good leader nor a business man make a good president. Leadership isn't something that just exists, it has to be created within a person. I think the biggest impediement to good decision making is hubris coupled with an inability to see your blindspots. Hubris is fairly self-explanatory but blindspots refers to a leaders inability to see where they are lacking in information or allowing biases to cloud judgement. This is were inclusive decision making is helpful. It colors in those blindspots and adds perspective to issues requiring a decision. By learning about leadership and its often subjective issues a leader can start to understand themselves. This will hopefully reduce hubris as well.

Blenko suggests that there are four elements of good decisions: quality, speed, yield, and effort. In your opinion, is there anything missing from this list?

Good decisions are no bigger than they need to be in order to get the job done. I would argue that precision would be a fifth element of decision making. To elaborate I feel that some decisions can be too sweeping in scope. In order to overhaul an entire system one must fully understand all the variables in play. It may be that smaller, more targeted decisions towards one variable can have bigger ramifications down the road. The Law of Unintended Consequences should always be considered when making decisions. There are times bold strokes may be needed but careful leadership will always encompass the downstream effect of decisions. In other words, make a change, measure results, make a change, measure results. If one does not measure the results of an action before taking another you can wind up chasing the gauges.