Decision Making – The Measure Of A Man?

Businesses are simple beasts.  A focused team delivering to satisfied customers who return with their friends. The age-old overused cliché is that a business is as only as good as its people.  I worked with a lady a few years back who happened to sit next to a prominent New Zealand businessman on a flight whose business had failed.  What he said to her has always stuck in my mind -his words of wisdom were ‘I told average people that they were great’.  For me leading teams is always a balance of carrot and stick within a positive environment. One of the great ironies of managing businesses and teams is the fact you do it with very little feedback and support. Two traits come in handy - confidence and robustness – neither of which help avoid the odd sleepless night.

With the last few decades being focused on soft skills within the workplace you can easily fall into this trap of over-motivating an average team into thinking they have reached greatness.  While this can give a cosy ‘feel good’ feeling within a business, ultimately the customers of the business are being let down due to poor decision making. Performance has to measured based on effectiveness to deliver to customers.  Graham Henry talks a lot about the All Blacks turning players into better young men.  Come September this year, as a customer of the All Blacks this is not the outcome I am looking for!

We live in a time where decision making has never been more important tactically and strategically for businesses. Not only are the decisions more important but they need to be made in shorter periods of time involving the dissemination of huge amounts of data.  Customers now not only have more choice when purchasing products and services they have a bigger range available on where and how these are purchased.  The move to online internet business models has challenged most business and their decision making, many are worrying that they are not ready.

The temptation has always been to look externally when there is a shortfall of knowledge and we have all done it hoping for the answer to ride in on a large white horse.  A true great team will already be there having understood the trends, identifying the short fall and gaining the required knowledge. Nobody should know your business better than you do - simple to say in a paragraph, harder to do when sitting at your desk.  I really admire a friend who has started her own online business Bubbalino and faced all the challenges around establishing a new market with the adoption of new technology. With the resources most of us have available we really have no excuse

How do we avoid telling average people that they are great?  Easy… judge them on their decision making.

^DB