As a manager, you will be making several different kinds of decisions. For example, you will be making considered decisions, choices made after careful consideration of a variety of possible solutions. For instance, a considered decision might involve the purchase of new office equipment or the addition of a product to your current line. As you can tell, they aren’t the kind of decisions that you will have to make every day. Besides a lot of personal thought, they may require the involvement of others—from your employees and peers to your manager and other members of senior management. You may have reached a conclusion but ask colleagues or staff to act as devil’s advocates and poke holes in your decision. You want them not only to consider the choice but also scrutinize it in terms of any implementation problems that might arise and the internal and external environment. Peter Drucker, the management guru, has said that this process of “dissent” adds to the likelihood of someone making the right decision.
Clearly, this process is time intensive—it takes time to find alternatives, to seek other viewpoints, to get dissent if any, and to determine implementation issues. But time spent in these activities generally minimizes trouble in executing the decision and maximizes the probability of success.
Operational decisions represent another category of quandaries you will encounter in your job. These decisions are made to avoid and address problems. For instance, you might have to sign a purchase request for office supplies like stationery and pens or for raw materials like electronic components, pipes, screws, and nails, or you might distribute work assignments when an employee is absent. Such decisions tend to become routine over time. While they are vital to the flow of business and may have immediate impact, they should become very much a part of the job. As a new manager, these decisions were likely tough to make, but as you become more familiar with the work, they should become easier and easier.
You also have to learn to make what are sometimes called ten-second decisions. These aren’t snap decisions—those are decisions you can make without any thought. Examples of snap decisions include:
- “Should I call a customer or write him a letter?”
- “Should I meet with my team this afternoon or wait until tomorrow?”
- “Should I eat lunch at my desk or go out?”
Ten-second decisions seem as insignificant as snap decisions, but they could have ramifications, and you need to give those some thought before making them. For instance, an employee has asked you if he could take tomorrow off. “You don’t have to tell me now—just before the end of my shift.” You think: He has done some outstanding work, but he has no vacation time left. If you say yes, you could be setting an unwise precedent. What should you do? Perhaps a distributor asks if her outlet can be placed ahead of another for delivery tomorrow. Should you do as requested, or could accommodating this single client alienate many more—even lose you an account?
Faced with a ten-second decision, you need to learn to think at least ten seconds before making a decision. You know that the individual asking the question wants an answer soon, but you may want to postpone the decision until you can think more about the matter. Too often, the ten-second decisions we make set precedents or are actually operational questions that demand further analysis.
We also have to think about our motivations when we make a ten-second decision. Let’s go back to that employee’s request for a day off. Do we think that granting this will increase the individual’s motivation, or are we trying to buy his friendship by saying yes. Taking that further, if we say yes, we should ask ourselves if a day off would achieve either result.
Replying no to the request would probably put the decision into the final category, a swallow-hard decision. These may be personally uncomfortable, because they may negatively impact interpersonal relationships either with our employees or our boss. Although these decisions may make us uneasy, they are necessary. They are the kind that you, as a manager, are being paid to make. Many times, the decisions we make will be unpopular.