Making the Tough Decisions
If you don’t like making decisions, small business ownership will not be your cup of tea.
If just the thought of having to choose between two undesirable alternatives gives you a headache, don’t quit your job.
If you obsess about which direction to take because you know you’ll have to live with any mistake you make, be sure to clock in tomorrow and thank your employer for the job.
Clearly, making decisions is easier for some than others. And it’s human nature to put off hard decisions in favor of easy ones. But there’s nothing easy about being a business owner, including having to make lots of decisions that are difficult, frightening and sometimes even professionally and financially dangerous.
Not only do business owners have to make many decisions, but in his book, Tough Management, Chuck Martin proposes that one of the seven principles of effective management is the ability to actually force tough decisions, to cultivate a management practice that gets the toughest decisions right out front and dealt with as soon as possible.
But in his research, Martin discovered that the difference between what management thought they were doing with regard to effective decision making and what their subordinates felt their bosses were doing made it look like these two groups were not watching to the same ballgame.
According to Martin’s research, two-thirds of managers believed they were making timely decisions dealing with tough calls quickly and acquiring input from subordinates. But when employees were asked about their bosses’ decision making performance, only a third supported their managers’ self evaluation.
Failure to deal with tough decisions by any CEO is unacceptable. But when the CEO is the owner of a small business, this management behavior is disproportionately more likey to translate into business failure that it is for a large business.
Here are three steps Martin suggests as a way to deal with tough decisions, each followed by my comments.
1. Collect and consider as much information as you can. The information comes from your experience and the research you and your staff conducts, within your available resources and time constraints.
2. Make the decision and communicate it to your staff. Perhaps the essence of entrepreneurship is being prepared to risk what you know for what you might learn. The most successful managers are able to pull the trigger on tough decisions, even if they don’t have every answer they would like.
3. Move on. The best way to prepare yourself to make a decision and more on is to subscribe to Blasingame’s Law of Decisions: When you make lots of decisions, and make one as quickly as possible, more of your decisions will be smaller, the individual impact of each one less consequential, and a bad decision will more likely be a lesson learned rather than a catastrophe.
Write this on a rock... Make lots of decisions, make them as quickly as possible and move on.
Jim Blasingame
Small Business Expert and host of The Small Business Advocate Show
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