By Blake DuBose and Mike DuBose
Good decisions breed success, energize staff, and build outstanding organizations. Keeping a positive perspective has helped us turn painful business mistakes, personal tragedies and bad decisions into treasured gifts from God! As Winston Churchill once said, “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” We view decision-making as a puzzle and adventure.
There are two types of decision-makers: those who try, stumble, get up, and try again, and those who fear making mistakes, agonize over decisions, and/or cease trying. Great leaders keep dreaming, challenging, testing, experimenting, and learning from their good and bad decisions.
Decision-making has changed dramatically with the advance of technology. In the past, decisions took weeks to be made via paper memos and snail mail. Now, information can be transmitted instantly through the Internet to many people at all organizational levels. Let’s examine good decision-making techniques:
Preventing: You can eliminate the need to make many unnecessary decisions if you anticipate and prevent problems. Think of what can go right and wrong. By implementing strategies in preparation, potential for stressful, rushed decisions (and failure) diminishes.
Identifying: Aggressively look for problems in their early stages when they emit weak signals. Leaders and staff in great companies team up to actively look for problems and proactively make decisions before disasters happen.
Analyzing: When problems surface and decisions are needed, trace symptoms to root causes without placing blame on any one person. Effective leaders seek all the information they can in the decision-making process so they can see the big picture. Avoid focusing only on symptoms; instead, attack the root cause and reduce the chances of a problem reoccurring (Total Quality Management).
Understanding if and when a decision needs to be made: Few decisions have to be made immediately, so don’t rush! Time is needed to thoroughly understand the reasons for problems and generate a variety of effective solutions.
Creating the right decision-making culture: Build an environment where employees are encouraged to share differing perspectives in a friendly, professional, and respectful way. Openness needs to start at the top and radiate to every level within the organization. Avoid asking for input from people who think like you. We want our decisions to be owned by leaders, employees, and customers alike. Our companies have followed the lead of others like Southwest Airlines to cut down on bureaucracy and thus expedite decision-making.
When weighing different paths, don’t let destructive motivators such as ego, greed, money, dishonesty, and bad ethics drive decisions. Run each important decision you make through these filters:
- Will results comply with our mission, vision, purpose, and values?
- Does the decision mesh with Jim Collins’ “Hedgehog Concept” (what the company does best, is most knowledgeable about, and is passionate about)?
- Will it affect the budget?
- Is it legal, ethical, and honest?
- How will it impact our staff and customers?
- Do our options seem to have a high success potential based on history and the facts?
- How will the decision build on our strengths? Improve our weaknesses? Create opportunity? Reduce threats? (SWOT analysis)
- Should I test it on a smaller basis before implementing it system-wide?
- Do competitors have information that could help me make the right decision?
- What does my intuition say?
- If the decision succeeds or fails, what are the negative and positive outcomes?
- What will our backup plan be?
Promoting reasonable, calculated risk-taking and decision-making: Great organizations take risks after careful study and create an atmosphere where it is acceptable to try new things. Ideas and strategies from every level must be encouraged and heard.
Making the right choices promptly: Many leaders stall on making decisions because they fear failure. Eleanor Roosevelt once remarked, “You gain strength, courage, and confidence when you look fear in the face.” Great leaders make timely, decisive, and often tough decisions. Avoid making decisions when you are rushed, threatened, tired, angry, emotional, desperate, hungry, frightened, depressed, using alcohol or other drugs, or sick. Make decisions for the right reasons and when you are most capable of rational thought.
Sometimes it may be helpful to dismantle large decisions or problems into smaller ones and work on each separately. Start out with smaller, simpler decisions that most stakeholders agree have a high success potential and work up to larger issues.
In Winning, Jack Welch writes, “Listen to your gut. It’s telling you something.” Intuition is a valuable tool, but you want your decisions to also be driven by facts and input from different sources. If you are spiritual, once you have all the data, pray for guidance from a higher power.
Pulling the trigger: Once you have solicited input and studied your choices thoroughly, make a timely decision. Don’t seek the “perfect answer.” A leader cannot please everyone—there will sometimes be “no-win” situations when no choice feels good and you must pick between bad or worse routes.
Executing consistent decisions: Once the decision is made, there should be no turning back—don’t waffle. Leaders need to be flexible but careful about changing their minds and reversing decisions. Second thoughts have slowed or aborted many wise choices!
Evaluating outcomes: Factually assess decisions to understand what worked and didn’t. If decisions are carefully studied and determined to be faulty, make alterations immediately but in a calm, orderly way. As Larry Bossidy told us, “Don’t hang on to or rationalize a bad decision too long. Cut your losses and move on!”
Communicate the decision promptly: When decisions are made or changes of course are necessary, notify everyone and explain them as soon as possible.
If you’re making good decisions most of the time, you’re on the road to building a great company. When you stumble (and you will), follow Jim Collins’ advice in Good to Great: stop, conduct an autopsy without pointing fingers, learn, share the wisdom with everyone, and move on to the next adventure. Great decision-makers turn mistakes into wisdom and never look back as they stay focused on the future.
Above all, when a decision proves successful, celebrate! As Jack Welch counseled us, people like victories and feeling like a part of something bigger than themselves.
And lastly, be humble and thankful for success!
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Blake DuBose graduated from Newberry College School of Business and is president of DuBose Web Group. You can view our published articles at www.duboseweb.com.
Mike DuBose has been in business since 1981 and is the author of The Art of Building a Great Business. He is the servant owner of three debt-free corporations, including Columbia Conference Center, Research Associates, and The Evaluation Group. For more articles, visit his nonprofit website www.mikedubose.com.
Katie Beck serves as senior technical writer to the DuBose family of companies. She is a graduate of the USC School of Journalism and Honors College.
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