Focus on customer facing decisions
What is the decision making culture like in your organization?
How much do you value transparency and contribution? Is internal communication clear and are the rules known to all?
Lack of documentation is the number one answer we get when discussing issues and bottlenecks in decision making. Consider, if you have access to the following information:
- Was a decision made?
- What was decided, by whom and why?
- If the decision was made, has it been executed?
Evaluating decision making, and understanding the process is not always an easy task. The quality and its relationship to organizational culture may sound too abstract to focus development efforts on. However, it is very core to the performance and mood of an organization, and should be of interest to any team leader, individual or manager aiming improve the impact of their work.
Are you looking to add value with your decisions? Are you getting the most out of multi-stakeholder decision making situations? Still experiencing silos and bad accountability? If so, you should continue reading.
How to fix the most important operational problems?
Let us look at the most important operational problems you need to fix. Typically, value is added close to the customer, close to the money. How do you efficiently solve complex customer facing situations? Issue tracking, warranty claims, handling deviations in quality, pricing for a special offer… These are situations where customer value is easily lost. In order to fully understand a problem, you need to go to its source and find the contributing factors. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Can you afford to risk customer or employee experience?
- How do you manage these decision making situations?
- Are you able to quickly, gather the right people with skills and insights to address the problem at hand and find a solution?
How to segment different types of decisions?
One way of segmenting different types of decisions is by quantity and complexity. One rule of thumb is that every strategic decision is equal to 10 tactical decisions, 100 operational level decisions and 1000 so called micro decisions. If so, where should you focus efforts on improving efficiency? Where is the impact biggest?
The micro-level can be automated in most cases and is more a question of task management. Operational situations have become increasingly more complex due to the fast pace of change. Deviation situations that do not have defined accountabilities or structured processes produce a growing need for ad hoc decision making.
How to make better decisions faster?
Yes, abstract problem solving and systematic decision making are related. The way in which we solve issues should be linked to our decision making process. Go close to the problem, go close to the customer, go close to those who will be impacted and effected by the situation. Involve the relevant and the right people, collaborate to find the best solution for the situation at hand and then make the decision. Understand the objectives, manage the execution, communicate, learn and be even better and more effective the next time. The way we make decisions is an agile, constantly rotating process.
Decision making is core to leadership on organization, network and team level – as well as for us as individuals. After all the digital jumps taken, we need to next add accountability, structure and collaboration to our decision making.
Leading modern work is hard – Fingertip makes it easier. We are responding to the challenge by bringing a brand new Microsoft Teams solution to assist teams in collaborative decision making. We are now seeking brave and ambitious organizations to take their decision making and communication to the next level with Fingertip.