Decision Making Techniques

How to Make Good Decisions

If you want to lead effectively, you need to be able to make good decisions. If you can
learn to do this in a timely and well-considered way, then you can lead your team to
spectacular and well-deserved success. However, if you dither or make poor decisions,
your team risks failure and your time as a leader will probably be brutally short.
The techniques in this section help you to make the best decisions possible with the information
you have available. They help you map out the likely consequences of decisions, work out the
importance of individual factors, and choose the best courses of action.

The section starts with some simple techniques that help you to make decisions where
many factors are claiming your attention. It then moves on to explain more powerful
techniques, such as use of Decision Trees, 6 Thinking Hats and Cost/Benefit Analysis,
which are routinely used in commercial Decision Making.

Improve Your Communication Skills

Regardless of the size of business you are in whether a large corporation, a small
company, or even a home-based business effective communication skills are essential
for success.
The articles in this section of Mind Tools help you to understand how to communicate
your message in the best possible way. After completing this section, you should have a
better understanding of how to communicate effectively to individuals and groups, and
using spoken, written and electronic communication.
These articles are further supported by the additional career development resources found
elsewhere on the Mind Tools web site.
Take a look around this section of Mind Tools, and then visit these other sections, all
researched and written by the Mind Tools team, who share a strong commitment to
helping you achieve lifelong success and happiness in your career

Stress Management Techniques

This section of Mind Tools helps you survive the intense stress that can come with a
challenging career.
The first articles help you to understand stress and what causes it: This is an important
starting point for effective stress management. They introduce you to the three main
approaches to stress management, and then shows you how you can identify the key
sources of stress in your life.
We then look at a range of stress management techniques. The Mind Tools approach is,
where possible, to tackle stress at source. This means that not only do we show you how
to cope with the symptoms of stress, we help you deal with the underlying causes as well.
By the end of the section, you should have a clearer understanding of stress and the
importance of managing it; you should be able to analyze the points of pressure in your
life, so that you can plan to neutralize them; and you will understand how to use a range
of different stress management techniques.

Time Management
Beat Work Overload. Increase Your Effectiveness. Achieve Much
More.
This section of Mind Tools teaches you personal time management skills. These are the simple,
practical techniques that have helped the leading people in business, sport and public service
reach the pinnacles of their careers.

The skills we explain help you become highly effective, by showing you how to
identify and focus on the activities that give you the greatest returns. Investing in
these time management activities will actually save you time, helping you work
smarter, not harder. What's more, these same techniques help you beat work
overload a key source of stress.
You'll finish by learning about goal setting, a vitally important skill for deciding
what you want to achieve with your life.

Mission Statements & Vision Statements

Unleashing the power of purpose
Vision Statements and Mission Statements are the inspiring words chosen by successful
leaders to clearly and concisely convey the direction of the organization. By crafting a
clear mission statement and vision statement, you can powerfully communicate your
intentions and motivate your team or organization to realize an attractive and inspiring
common vision of the future.
Mission Statements and Vision Statements do two distinctly different jobs.
A Mission Statement defines the organization's purpose and primary objectives. Its prime
function is internal to define the key measure or measures of the organizations success
and its prime audience is the leadership team and stockholders.
Vision Statements also define the organizations purpose, but this time they do so in terms
of the organizations values rather than bottom line measures (values are guiding beliefs
about how things should be done.) The vision statement communicates both the purpose
and values of the organization. For employees, it gives direction about how they are
expected to behave and inspires them to give their best. Shared with customers, it shapes
customers understanding of why they should work with the organization.

Tip:
Mission Statements and Vision Statements usually refer to an organization or an
organizational unit. Team Charters can have a similar role when briefing teams.
First we look at creating mission statements. Then we create vision statements.

Mission Statement Creation

1. To create your mission statement, first identify your organizations winning
idea.
This is the idea or approach that will make your organization stand out from its
competitors, and is the reason that customers will come to you and not your
competitors (see tip below).
2. Next identify the key measures of your success. Make sure you choose the most
important measures (and not too many of them!)
3. Combine your winning idea and success measures into a tangible and measurable
goal.

4. Refine the words until you have a concise and precise statement of your mission,
which expresses your ideas, measures and desired result.

Tip:
OK, so were a bit glib here talking about the winning idea this is a prime subject
of the discipline of business strategy, and it can take a lot of effort to find, shape and
test. See our articles on USP Analysis, SWOT Analysis and Core Competence Analysis
for starting points, and make sure you do the homework needed!
Example:
Take the example of a produce store whose winning idea is farm freshness. The owner
identifies two keys measures of her success: freshness and customer satisfaction. She
creates her mission statement which is the action goal that combines the winning idea
and measures of success.
The mission statement of Farm Fresh Produce is:
To become the number one produce store in Main Street by selling the highest quality,
freshest farm produce, from farm to customer in under 24 hours on 75% of our range and
with 98% customer satisfaction.

Vision Statement Creation

Once youve created your mission statement, move on to create your vision statement:
1. First identify your organizations mission. Then uncover the real, human value in
that mission.
2. Next, identify what you, your customers and other stakeholders will value most
about how your organization will achieve this mission. Distil these into the values
that your organization has or should have.
3. Combine your mission and values, and polish the words until you have a vision
statement inspiring enough to energize and motivate people inside and outside
your organization.
Using the example mission statement developed for Farm Fresh Produce, the owner
examines what she, her customers and her employees value about her mission.

The four most important things she identifies are: freshness, healthiness, tastiness and
local-ness of the produce. Heres the Vision Statement she creates and shares with
employees, customers and farmers alike:
We help the families of Main Town live happier and healthier lives by providing the
freshest, tastiest and most nutritious local produce: From local farms to your table in
under 24 hours.
Do you feel stressed and overloaded? Or that your career seems stalled? If so, then you
may need to brush up your delegation skills!
If you work on your own, theres only a limited amount that you can do, however hard
you work. You can only work so many hours in a day. There are only so many tasks you
can complete in these hours. There are only so many people you can help by doing these
tasks. And, because the number of people you can help is limited, your success is limited.
However, if youre good at your job, people will want much more than this from you.
This can lead to a real sense of pressure and work overload: You cant do everything that
everyone wants, and this can leave you stressed, unhappy, and feeling that youre letting
people down.
On the positive side, however, youre being given a tremendous opportunity if you can
find a way around this limitation. If you can realize this opportunity, you can be
genuinely successful!
One of the most common ways of overcoming this limitation is to learn how to delegate
your work to other people. If you do this well, you can quickly build a strong and
successful team of people, well able to meet the demands that others place.
This is why delegation is such an important skill, and is one that you absolutely have to
learn!

Why People Dont Delegate

To figure out how to delegate properly, its important to understand why people avoid it.
Quite simply, people dont delegate because it takes a lot of up-front effort.
After all, which is easier: designing and writing content for a brochure that promotes a
new service you helped spearhead, or having other members of your team do it?
You know the content inside and out. You can spew benefit statements in your sleep. It
would be relatively straightforward for you to sit down and write it. It would even be fun!
The question is, Would it be a good use of your time?

While on the surface its easier to do it yourself than explain the strategy behind the
brochure to someone else, there are two key reasons that mean that its probably better to
delegate the task to someone else:

First, if you have the ability to spearhead a new campaign, the chances are that
your skills are better used further developing the strategy, and perhaps coming up
with other new ideas. By doing the work yourself, youre failing to make best use
of your time.

Second, by meaningfully involving other people in the project, you develop those
peoples skills and abilities. This means that next time a similar project comes
along, you can delegate the task with a high degree of confidence that it will be
done well, with much less involvement from you.

Delegation allows you to make the best use of your time and skills, and it helps other
people in the team grow and develop to reach their full potential in the organization.

When to Delegate
Delegation is a win-win when done appropriately, however that does not mean that you
can delegate just anything. To determine when delegation is most appropriate there are
five key questions you need to ask yourself:

Is there someone else who has (or can be given) the necessary information or
expertise to complete the task? Essentially is this a task that someone else can do,
or is it critical that you do it yourself?

Does the task provide an opportunity to grow and develop another persons skills?

Is this a task that will recur, in a similar form, in the future?

Do you have enough time to delegate the job effectively? Time must be available
for adequate training, for questions and answers, for opportunities to check
progress, and for rework if that is necessary.

Is this a task that I should delegate? Tasks critical for long-term success (for
example, recruiting the right people for your team) genuinely do need your
attention.

If you can answer yes to at least some of the above questions, then it could well be
worth delegating this job.

Other factors that contribute to the delegability of a task include:

1. The projects timelines/deadlines.
How much time is there available to do the job?
Is there time to redo the job if its not done properly the first time?
What are the consequences of not completing the job on time?
2. Your expectations or goals for the project or task(s), including:
How important is it that the results are of the highest possible quality?
Is an "adequate" result good enough?
Would a failure be crucial?

How much would failure impact other things?

That being said, having all these conditions present is no guarantee that the delegated task
will be completed successfully either. You also need to consider to whom you will
delegate the task and how you will do it.

The Who and How of Delegating

Having decided to delegate a task there are some other factors to consider as well. As you
think these through you can use our free Delegation Worksheet to keep record of the tasks
you choose to delegate and who you want to delegate them to.
To Whom Should You Delegate?
The factors to consider here include:
1. The experience, knowledge and skills of the individual as they apply to the
delegated task.
What knowledge, skills and attitude does the person already have?
Do you have time and resources to provide any training needed?
2. The individuals preferred work style.
How independent is the person?
What does he or she want from his or her job?
What are his or her long-term goals and interest, and how do these align
with the work proposed?
3. The current workload of this person.
Does the person have time to take on more work?
Will you delegating this task require reshuffling of other responsibilities
and workloads?

When you first start to delegate to someone, you may notice that he or she takes longer
than you do to complete tasks. This is because you are an expert in the field and the
person you have delegated to is still learning. Be patient: if you have chosen the right
person to delegate to, and you are delegating correctly, you will find that he or she quickly
becomes competent and reliable.

How Should You Delegate?

Use the following principles to delegate successfully:
1. Clearly articulate the desired outcome. Begin with the end in mind and specify the
desired results.
2. Clearly identify constraints and boundaries. Where are the lines of authority,
responsibility and accountability? Should the person:

Wait to be told what to do?

Ask what to do?
Recommend what should be done, and then act?
Act, and then report results immediately?
Initiate action, and then report periodically?

3. Where possible, include people in the delegation process. Empower them to

decide what tasks are to be delegated to them and when.
4. Match the amount of responsibility with the amount of authority. Understand that
you can delegate some responsibility, however you cant delegate away ultimate
accountability. The buck stops with you!
5. Delegate to the lowest possible organizational level. The people who are closest to
the work are best suited for the task, because they have the most intimate
knowledge of the detail of everyday work. This also increases workplace
efficiency, and helps to develop people.
6. Provide adequate support, and be available to answer questions. Ensure the
projects success through ongoing communication and monitoring as well as
provision of resources and credit.
7. Focus on results. Concern yourself with what is accomplished, rather than
detailing how the work should be done: Your way is not necessarily the only or
even the best way! Allow the person to control his or her own methods and
processes. This facilitates success and trust.

8. Avoid upward delegation. If there is a problem, dont allow the person to shift
responsibility for the task back to you: ask for recommended solutions; and dont
simply provide an answer.
9. Build motivation and commitment. Discuss how success will impact financial
rewards, future opportunities, informal recognition, and other desirable
consequences. Provide recognition where deserved.
10. Establish and maintain control.

Discuss timelines and deadlines.

Agree on a schedule of checkpoints at which youll review project
progress.
Make adjustments as necessary.
Take time to review all submitted work.

In thoroughly considering these key points prior to and during the delegation process you
will find that you delegate more successfully.

Keeping Control
Now, once you have worked through the above steps, make sure you brief your team
member appropriately. Take time to explain why they were chosen for the job, whats
expected from them during the project, the goals you have for the project, all timelines
and deadlines and the resources on which they can draw. And agree a schedule for
checking-in with progress updates.
Lastly, make sure that the team member knows that you want to know if any problems
occur, and that you are available for any questions or guidance needed as the work
progresses.
We all know that as managers, we shouldnt micro-manage. However, this doesnt mean
we must abdicate control altogether: In delegating effectively, we have to find the
sometimes-difficult balance between giving enough space for people to use their abilities
to best effect, while still monitoring and supporting closely enough to ensure that the job
is done correctly and effectively.

The Importance of Full Acceptance

When delegated work is delivered back to you, set aside enough time to review it
thoroughly. If possible, only accept good quality, fully-complete work. If you accept
work you are not satisfied with, your team member does not learn to do the job properly.
Worse than this, you accept a whole new tranche of work that you will probably need to
complete yourself. Not only does this overload you, it means that you dont have the time
to do your own job properly. Of course, when good work is returned to you, make sure to

both recognize and reward the effort. As a leader, you should get in the practice of
complimenting members of your team every time you are impressed by what they have
done. This effort on your part will go a long way toward building team members selfconfidence and efficiency, both of which will be improved on the next delegated task;
hence, you both win.

Key Points:
At first sight, delegation can feel like more hassle than its worth, however by delegating
effectively, you can hugely expand the amount of work that you can deliver.
When you arrange the workload so that you are working on the tasks that have the
highest priority for you, and other people are working on meaningful and challenging
assignments, you have a recipe for success.
To delegate effectively, choose the right tasks to delegate, identify the right people to
delegate to, and delegate in the right way. Theres a lot to this, but youll achieve so much
more once youre delegating effectively

Stress Busters:
** Story Telling
**Memory Games
**Matching Pairs
**Blind jigsaw