Making executive decisions is necessary in your career life

When you rise up the the career ladder, you will increasingly be tasked with making decisions. Some of these decisions may have a deep impact on your career as well as the lives of other people working with you. Make the right ethical decisions and you become an asset to your organisation.

Imagine a situation in which your company is suffering a financial crisis and the management team that you head has identified the causes and you are the decision maker.

To arrest this crisis, one of the proposed solutions is to retrench 30 per cent of your staff. As you are the key decision-maker, you have the unenviable task of selecting the employees who have to go. How are you going to make that decision?

It is a tough situation to be in. However, when such situations arise, only those who have the decision making skills to make tough decisions will survive. Remember that there is no such thing as a perfect plan. Any decision that you make will have with it certain inherent flaws. The important thing is to objectively identify these flaws and either try to eliminate or minimise their effects.

Here are a few pointers on how you can become a good decision-maker:

Consider facts in making decisions
Any ethical decision you make must be based on facts that have been verified and authenticated so that your decision is a rational one. Remember the acronym CARF, which means that you have "considered all relevant factors".

Be objective in your decision making
Do not be influenced by people in your office who may want you to rule in their favour. When people start working together, there is a tendency to form cliques. Each clique will have its own sub-culture and its own way of doing things in the office. As a decision-maker, it is your duty to ensure that you remain apolitical and base your judgment on your effective understanding of the situation.

Avoid "groupthink" mentality
This is characterised by a situation where all the members of a group or team feel that they are invincible and whatever decision and action they take will not fail.

Such a situation comes about when an organisation has been relatively successful in most of its endeavours and there is an overall sense of complacency.

Organisations that fall prey to a "groupthink" mentality find it difficult to make harsh decisions when the need arises and prefer to take a wait-and-see approach, with the risk that things will become worse before anything is done.

You will notice the effect of a "groupthink" mentality when you are at meetings or group discussions and everyone seems to agree with everyone else. There is no dissention and no resistance to proposals put forward by anyone in the group.

Take action after making decisions
To be an excellent decision-maker, you must also be the kind of person who takes action. Once you have made an executive decision, you must give yourself a timeline for its implementation. You also have to implement a review process to see how effective your decision has been in improving a problematic situation.

Learn from failure after a bad decision
There will be times when things do not quite turn out the way you wanted. There is no guaranteed success formula in the decision-making process.

Even if you have made bad decisions, what makes you an effective individual is your ability to assess the damage and come up with a solution to put things right.

Decision-making is not easy. In the decision making process, you will face obstacles and criticism, and in some cases, you may even have to pay a high price for an executive decision you took.

Sustaining a few "executive bruises" will give you valuable feedback on how you can refine your decision-making process and decision making skills, Ultimately, if you do your homework, use sound reasoning and all the facts at your disposal, you as a decision maker,are unlikely to make bad decisions that you have to apologise for.