Babystep 8: How Will You Make Decisions?

Decision making is easy when you’re a small company. But the more that your company grows, the more challenging decision making will become.

Not only that, but the path between a decision being made and its implementation will become increasingly more convoluted. When a company is small, a decision is made and implementation naturally follows. Yet, after a company expands, leaders are frequently surprised by how decisions that were made do not get implemented.

You might make important decisions, but then they aren’t implemented well. You can make poor decisions that have a major effect on your company. Maybe you evaluate the decision, do all of the research necessary but misjudge how much buy-in you have from your team.

And making decisions without having buy-in from your employees should be done very sparingly. When you have to push people to comply, those relationships will inevitably be strained and you yourself will become frustrated.

Decision making has the opportunity to be almost effortless if you understand your culture, your strategy, your tactics and your finances.

First, every decision must align with your culture. Does this decision align with our mission and does it help us move toward our vision? Does this align with our values?

Then the decision must be filtered through your strategy, and you’ll have to ask how it will affect your target customers.

Third, the decision must flow through your tactics. How will this decision affect your ability to meet your priorities?

And lastly, how does this decision affect your financial situation?

So many companies are not clear about vision, mission, values, strategy, and they are behind on their financial statements — so they have no systematic way to evaluate their decisions.

Once you have a decision making system, you can effectively delegate decision making. Who gets to make what decisions? You can effectively delegate based on situation or financial impact, such as: if the decision is within your department, you can make financial decisions up to this dollar amount or you have the authority and power to make these kinds of decisions.

There are five levels of delegations

  • Your employee handles it and is free to do whatever they want

  • Your employee handles it however they want but reports back to you on what was done

  • Your employee tells you how they will handle the situation first and must get your approval

  • Your employee conducts research and presents you with three options and you decide

  • Your employee has no authority and only follows specific orders on how you want the work done

It’s important to be clear with your employees how much authority they have so decisions are executed efficiently.

It’s important to be clear with your employees how much authority they have so decisions are executed efficiently.

Les McKeown has a great system for making decisions in his book “PredictableSuccess: Getting Your Organization on the Growth Track — and Keeping it There.”

  1. Data: gather all the data and distribute to all the decision makers

  2. Deliberate: have healthy debate bade on the data and all concerns

  3. Decide or Deliberately Delay: the decision until a future date

If you’ve decided to delay the decision, it’s helpful to decide what will bring that decision out of being “delayed.”

Note that different decision making methods will have different amounts of efficiency and buy-in.

  1. Command: Decisions are handed down with no involvement. Very efficient but will have the lowest buy-in.

  2. Consult: Input is gathered from the team before a decision is made.

  3. Consensus: No decision is made without everyone agreeing. The most inefficient with the highest buy-in.

  4. Democracy: Vote. Very efficient and effective when all the options are about the same and the leader doesn’t have a strong opinion on what should be done.

You can purchase SCI’s, “From Your Coffee Shop Dream, To Your Dream Coffee Shop” book here.

With SCI’s book, you’ll walk out these steps through the fictional, but all too relatable, story of Claire Wallace as she journeys toward her dream coffee shop.

Alex Mosher