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Stop Making Decisions!
Introduction / Take Away Hundreds of decisions are made in the workplace every single day. If just a fraction of these are pushed down by managers to employees, engagement levels will skyrocket...
Employees need to feel as if they?re making a significant contribution to the team?s success, and enabling them to own decision-making within the team is at the core of engagement. However, managers must ensure that they create the perfect environment and framework to enable this to occur splendidly, or else the outcome could be disastrous.
How controlling are you as a manager? Are you constantly breathing down your employees? necks? Do they see you and get a fright? Do they talk to you with nerves in their tone and body language, or are they calm, together, and themselves? Relinquish some of this control and pass it on to your employees because it is employee control that is the next part of a world-class decision-making environment. Empowering your employees to make decisions is useless if you also don?t permit them to control the process. If you see them headed for failure and you know from your previous experience that the decision they?ve made has only one outcome and that outcome is a crash, let it happen. I can almost hear you cry ?WHAT!? as you read this, but just let it happen. People by nature need to make mistakes to learn. If they don?t make the mistake today, they?re going to make it eventually anyway, so let it happen. Whilst we?ve all heard a million times the line ?people learn from their mistakes?, what we don?t hear is that people learn even more from having to fix their mistakes. So let them happen. Employees will see the gift of empowerment as fake and insincere if it?s not accompanied by employee control as well. Who?s ultimately responsible for the outcome of the decision? Is it you? Is it your manager? Is it the team? No, it?s the employee who?s been empowered and placed in control of the decision, and he or she needs to know it. This is where the fourth element of decision-making comes into play ? employee ownership. An employee who feels that accountability will be passed onto someone else if the decision turns sour will result in half-hearted decisions. An employee who has the impression that he/she will not be questioned over a decision gone badly will result in unnecessarily risky decisions. So if you?re going to push decisions down, and this article overwhelmingly suggests you do so, then also hand over ownership as well. It?s the combination of these four elements, employee ability, employee empowerment, employee control, and employee ownership, which create the Decision-Making Matrix. And it?s achieving a high degree in each of these areas that results in a place in the top right quadrant, the quadrant where fabulous decisions are made. Any other combination results in decisions that are either flawed, floppy, or frustrated, and landing in one of these quadrants can make a genuinely good idea a disastrous one. Employee engagement is critical to organisational success. Studies around the world are consistently highlighting the vast differences in profit between organisations with high levels of engagement and those where engagement is low. Pushing decisions down is a golden way, a big step, and a sure-fire way of getting to the top. But unless you?re also creating the right framework and environment for this to occur, then you?re only halfway there. < Ends >
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