Management Training – Should It be An Individual, a Team or a Management Decision?
This week I am in Vancouver working with one of our valued luxury automotive clients, facilitating a popular course offered by Pathways Training and eLearning that focuses on managing the business and people. One of the more popular topics that is covered over the 3-day program revolves around decision making, more specifically, when to utilize a team effort versus deciding on your own.
As I am sure you can imagine this can be a lively topic of conversation as some managers feel making decisions based on a team discussion is a time waster and not always the best route to take for many reasons, most of which are related to what is best for the business against what is best for the employee. Other managers prefer the team decision process as it can be an excellent way to engage your employees, make them feel part of the process and selfishly for some, make it easier for the manager to shake of some of the responsibility of the decision turns out to be the wrong one.
Regardless of what a person to choose one over the other, I thought it would be worthwhile to offer some of the key tips and suggestions we discussed as part of this topic.
There are generally three decision making conditions as follows:
Certainty. Each alternative’s outcome is known in advance.
Risk. Probabilities can be assigned to each outcome.
Uncertainty. Lack of information or knowledge makes the outcome of each alternative unpredictable such that no probabilities can be determined.
Next week I am going to continue this topic by providing a list of the advantages/disadvantages of both teams based and individual decision making, and conclude with a brief summary of what situations may work best for each.
