Decision Making Managers

Decision making is key to a manager’s job. Accordingly, managers should know their strengths and weaknesses in this area so that they can hone and improve their decision making.

You also should want to make as many decisions as possible while avoiding errors and making the best of your staff.

I have a client who has a great strength in making quick decisions. He is wrong about 10% of the time, i.e., out of every 20 decisions he makes every day, he is wrong twice. Another client really doesn’t like to make decisions because he does not like to be wrong. He makes about 4 decisions a day after agonizing over them, and he is rarely ever wrong.

The one with the 18 right decisions makes 14 more decisions a day than the agonizing client, with the “cost” of the added decisions the 2 bad decisions. So, my question to you is, who is the more effective manager, considering none of the wrong decisions create fatalities or irreversible harm? It’s a business, not a hospital or construction site. Also, the wrong decisions are usually easily noticed and rectified, and everyone gets easily back on track.

Well, my answer is that it depends.

It might seem that the client who makes the most decisions is the better manager. Quick decisions prevent the staff from waiting for instructions about what to do or shifting to something less important while waiting for a decision so they can continue on their main project. Further, the 10% error rate is not that harmful.

However, perhaps the one that makes the 4 decisions is the better manager. His decisions are for really important issues, while the 20 decisions of the other manager are the result of a failure to delegate or train or because of micromanagement with staff that are not empowered to use initiative and make decisions. Additionally, the client making the 4 decisions trained his staff to make the other 16 and is willing to accept an error rate of 2 a day as the “cost” of the training, development and growth of his staff.

If you find yourself making too many decisions, you are probably overly mired with routine decisions, and not doing your real job as a manager. You can solve this by clearly defining, to yourself, your role and then using the people working for you to help you achieve your goal of better performing your role.

I posted a prior blog with some tips on being a better manager that was reprinted from my Power Bites book.

Comment: My Memoirs as a CPA book has been published and is available in Kindle and print editions at Amazon. Buy it, read it and enjoy it!