Friday, July 30, 2010

To decide or not to decide – Decision dilemma

Decision making is the accountability of the role. The person can be senior or junior; he has to take decisions in his life, small or big, good or bad, simple or complex. However they do not take decisions. To decide or not to decide is the dilemma. Everybody prefers to be in this dilemma. There are certain managers who even do not encourage their people to take decisions. Juniors can not take decisions and senior don’t give the decisions. At the end of the day, every paper and every issue is tabled at higher authority. He pushes it to his higher authority and so on. If somebody wants to take the decision, his manager will ask him hundred questions so that the person will confuse well.

I have seen one senior level confused manager who never wanted to make any decision. If any employee would go to him, he would ask proposal, lot of data, and lot of information. He would sit on this information for days and month for the incubation. Time is the best solution on any issue was his principle. After some days, problem would resolve automatically. Still the issue persists; he would put the unique remark on proposal, “Principally agreed”. He spent almost 20 years in the organization without taking any decisions and only “agreeing principally”! Principally agreed! The word itself connotes “shrinking the accountability of decision making”. I was amazed when this guy conducted one workshop on decision making.

Such type of people normally escape from the decision making process but at the other hand want to know everything to save the skin. It is used to avoid actually making a decision or even to create a false choice so as not to have to make a decision. They also can be categorized in “Play it safe” which involves making the choice is the least amount of risk.

Such managers forget that a decision is a commitment to act. In commitment you have to take the responsibility of decisions.

The reason for such decision making can be the uncertainty. Many decisions that managers deal with every day involve at least some degree of uncertainty and require non-programmed decision making. But it is not wide to categorize all the decision on the play it safe category.

There are different ways to take the decision. Most of the times, decisions are mostly impulsive. Sometimes the actual issue is different and the decision is taken on prima facie issue. In short decisions are taken based on the symptoms and not on actual problems.

Right or wrong, simple or complex, good or bad, people should learn to take decisions. It requires courage. How courageous are you?

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hats of you sir. Great I have seen such people in my career.

Kisan Dadage said...

Show must go on....
Very Nice Sir..

Anonymous said...

Hi Vinod

I like the subject and the way you present it. Seniors dont give authority to juniors to take decision. Sometimes they give permisssion but they make lot of hurdles between the work.

Madhuri Kulkarni
Pune

Sureshchandra Padhye said...

Good piece of writing; surely substantiated with expirince. Go ahead.

sanjayrakecha said...

Sir
Very gud artical. Taking a decision is right way to win the match.Otherwise you lose the match.
In business or workplace or at your home.

Neha Mehta said...

Decision making is as easy as an ice melting in summer. However only, when its taken for personal reasons. This is because, personally you know that no matter what may be the outcome, you are the only person enjoying the profit or loss. However when its comes to professionalism, if your decisions invariably turn out to be good, you are labelled a good decision maker, however if your decision fails to get good results, nobody sees the "courage" behind an attempt to take a decision and stand by it, of all people who avoided smoothly to take any such step. Hence its probably the credit or the acceptability, people are worried about. May be they are enough scared of loosing a job due to a failed attempt. Its more of an insecurity than courage that drives them on any kind of decision making.

Anami Shankar said...

Come on Neha! Why the person feel insecured? He has not the guts to act.

YogeshHukame said...

The best way to learn decision making is by starting with taking small decision and then checks it effects.At the end of the day you can note it down and identify the facts that were taken into account to make you take that decision.Once the confidence is developed you will yourself start making big decisions..This is what I think...and I definitely agree that decision needs to be taken..

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