Even the most invincible warriors and giants have their weak spots. Regardless of the size of your company, there is hard work and risk involved in making strategic business decisions, and it is important to ensure that you are taking strategic action and making effective use of your time in order to avoid negative unintended consequences.
While all business leaders must make effective business decisions, privately-held firms have even more vulnerability when it comes to their decision-making, due to the fact that their leaders are typically more involved in the business’s day-to-day operations.
The key for leaders of smaller firms, as Michael E. Gerber put it in his book The E-Myth, is to learn to work on their business more than in their business.
In other words, map out time in your schedule to deal with strategic challenges and opportunities on a regular basis. In doing so, you will take control over the future, and protect yourself from the feeling that you’re running out of time during the decision-making process.
Executives often pride themselves in their ability to make quick decisions based on their experience. However, the speed in which a decision is made does not say much about the quality of that decision. In fact, quick judgments are much riskier and often wrong.
By slowing down the process, you have far more to gain than you have to lose; allotting time to thoroughly think through a decision before the deadline allows for the proper level of clear-headed discussion and deliberation. While these processes takes time and effort, forming judgments based on conscious thinking and the critical examination of evidence, simply by taking more time and deliberating over a decision more thoroughly, gives you the chance to correct potential mistakes and revise your decisions prior to implementing them. The solution is straightforward: change the timing and the focus of the process.
Schedule frequent meetings and make them a regular part of your business operations routine. Remember that it’s not time that’s against you, per say; it’s the lack of time you should be arming yourself against. If you schedule it, you’ll treat it as a priority. Follow through. Set milestones.
Bring the intervals closer together (schedule the meetings more frequently) when dealing with and deciding upon the most important decisions. More time equals less pressure, but don’t forget to actually put allotted time to use. Make strategic decisions—not just strategic discussions. The strategic planning phase entails most of the most valuable hours which you pour into your business-- however, strategic planning must culminate in a decision for its full value to be realized.
Slowing down the decision process, regularly and thoroughly discussing and deliberating over strategies and ideas, and following through on decisions consciously and deliberately are definite best practices for reducing unintended consequences that may arise from executive decisions. By employing these three techniques, you will reduce time-induced stress, experience clearer and more logical thinking, make more effective and timely strategic decisions, and ultimately reduce downstream unintended consequences.
We are all given the same number of hours in a day. The choice of what do with those 1,440 minutes given to us daily is the choice that we independently make—consciously or subconsciously— every single day. As stated in my latest book: “It’s about working towards success, instead of just hoping for it.”
More information can be found in my recently released book, Killing Cats Leads to Rats: Mitigating the Unintended Consequences of Business Decisions. Purchase the book on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/2pGJB6D