Businesses without effective decision-makers are like hamlet without the prince of Denmark. While decision-making is considered the most crucial characteristic of business leaders, they’ve got a new job to create clarity out of ambiguity. In this post, we share how to make effective business decisions in 4-easy steps.
Decisions made by the business leaders have the potential to determine whether an organization will succeed or fail. As an organization grows, the decision making generally becomes more frequent, more complicated, and has more serious results.
The most successful business leaders will tell you that they too have made wrong decisions, but failure always leads to a new experience to build a strong foundation. In today’s competitive world, where everything within an organization depends on decisions, it becomes crucial to learn how to make effective business decisions.
Here’s what marketing leaders suggested on how to make effective business decisions:
Table of Contents
1. Make Good Decision Measuring Their Impact
Do you know an adult makes over 35,000 conscious decisions every day? But they have no meaning. Good decisions are all about the impact they make, and impact includes many things.
Sometimes your decision might impact the people in your team or other people in the company. The impact can also include monetary loss and increased risk. More often than not, business leaders are given the task of making decisions in the best interest of consumers. With a lot to do, business leaders have to put a different cap every time they make a decision.
How to make effective business decisions? Step 1
- Prepare a list of people that you might impact with your decisions
- Write pros and cons of each option you have
It will give you a better picture of the outcomes of each option leading to effective decision making.
2. Consulting Is The Best Techniques
You can rarely make good decisions in isolation. While some think tanks don’t consider sharing their ideas, we think good ideas often come from the inputs of others. People avoid discussions on their ideas, but we think great ideas come in the aftermath of discussions.
How to make effective business decisions? Step 2
- Consult the ideas with the affected people on the list and make possible changes
- Look for any areas of uncertainty in your decision
- Consult with someone who has better knowledge of the same
- Understand how your decision will benefit the people
Remember how you make a decision is more important than the decision you make!
3. Good Decision Demands Good Homework
Whether it is small or big, you cannot jump to a decision without basic analysis. For expensive decisions, you might need a lot of research, for small ones, you need a little.
While you have two options that you discussed above, you need to think about the following aspects from each perspective.
How to make effective business decisions? Step 3
- Cost: How much does it cost to implement the option you choose?
- Time: How long will it take to impact and deliver results?
- Risk: In case you choose an option, how risky is it? What is the risk factor?
- People & Impact: Just like we did in step 1, think about the impact it will make and who (team, people, consumer, or else) will benefit from this option?
- Goals: Make sure your ideas are aligned with your organizational goals.
4. Good Decisions Take Time
If it is taking longer than usual, it will be the best decision you will have made. Business leaders spend weeks, months, or even years on decision-making. They simply make a decision, research, analyze the outcomes, modify and repeat! That’s how the cream comes out.
If you have followed these steps, you have a chance to make a good decision. You might not be perfect at first, but try, get outcomes, and repeat. Remember that the best decisions are nothing but someone’s best practice.