The CBI and British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) want tens of 1000’s of new homes to be built, creating new jobs and providing affordable homes! Ok, but then there’s the issue of WHERE! Nobody wants loads of new homes built on their own doorstep! But we can all see the benefit of how this will help commerce and firms in general.
So, much like in your own business, it’s down to making difficult decisions. How do you make these important decisions especially when you know that some won’t be in agreeance?? Read on to gain Four steps to effective decision making:
Constructive environment.
- What are you hoping to achieve from this? – Define it clearly
- How is the decision going to be made? Yourself? A team? What’s the best way of deciding? Ascertain this.
- Who needs to be involved? Contact all relevant stakeholders and allow them to have input
- Why are you doing this? Encourage people to step up with their opinions for the better of the whole. (It’s not a competition just to see who can have their idea adopted)
Positive alternatives.
- Many heads working together create ideas that you simply may have not considered. Use those around you to Brainstorm to generate fresh ideas. (Henry Ford realised the strength of his engineers and used them, as they were hands on, to come up with solutions)
- Grab a different perspective! Get your team members to swap hats. Sales to look at it from the accountant’s point of view. Logistics from the customer. Solicitor’s language for the client etc.
- Consider the ‘KJ method’ (Kawakita Jiro). The what? Allow everyone to make random suggestions then group each idea under a title banner (eg. Not enough time to have a break, don’t feel appreciated, get teams together to meet more frequently under ‘Staff Morale’ etc). Then ascertain which topic needs addressing first due to comments made.
Choose the best alternative.
- Consider the Grid Analysis tool. Taking Options and Factors and creating a matrix that weighs them together to obtain a strong result where many areas are needed to be considered.
- Another is ‘Nominal Group Technique’ for decisions across a number of people. Often with outcomes such as spending finance. All ideas are listed. each person puts these in their preferred order, ie favourite is #1, least is #7 (if there are 7 headings etc). When all are received and tallied, the overall decision will be for the item with the ‘lowest’ score.
Communicate your decision, and take action.
- Critical to any success. Talk about why that particular decision was made (this is no longer open for debate). Openly discuss the potential benefits as well as risks involved, make it balanced. From this point, check out articles on ‘Change Management’ on our web to cover this subject.
These are but an informal way of introducing ways to help decision making. Coaching to Success utilise these and many other tools to help you with the process of this and invites you to contact us to open conversations on how we can assist in this or other areas that you, your company or firm are wishing to excel at.
Please contact Neil Nutburn on 07761 187238 or send an email to neil@coachingtosuccess.co.uk to arrange a free, no obligation consultation.
Our business is about your success and your future successes are in your hands so give us a call so we can help you turn the ideas into reality.
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