Leadership Edge Workshop

Effective Decision-Making and Follow-Through

Sponsored and Hosted by DLA Piper

April 6, 2007 Workshop Topic: Effective Decision-Making and Follow-Through, with Marcia Daszko, Marcia Daszko & Associates

Effective decision making is a challenge that people face everyday. For leaders of organizations, where decisions impact thousands of people, organizations and industries, the process of making effective decisions becomes critical. Some decisions impact life or death situations. Fundamentally, making decisions means making choices based on multiple variables that are both rational and emotional. Choices are made by assessing what is known and certain, what is at risk, and what is unknown with probable outcomes. Once decisions are made, they need to be implemented.

In this session, you will bring your skills and thoughts from our previous sessions - your personal brand of leadership, expanding your communication style, leading with power, influence and integrity, and apply it to the decision-making process.

Regardless of whether you attended our previous leadership workshops, in this session, we will explore what it takes to make more effective decisions and execute them. We will explore the obstacles to great decisions and how to remove them. We will discuss the challenges to executing decisions and how you can make changes tomorrow to achieve better decision making and execution.

It is our hope that you will be intrigued and inspired by the conversation and commit to new actions, using your thoughts and tools to become a more effective decision-maker, a more effective leader. We hope also to make connections between like-minded attendees and to foster ongoing discussions on this and other related topics of interest to entrepreneurs and executives. Regardless of whether you were able to participate in our previous two workshops, we hope that you will join us for our continuing discussion on how to elicit effective leadership skills in ourselves, and in those we work and play with.

To encourage growth based on continual transformative change:

• Have an aim/compelling purpose and communicate what it is, what it means to stakeholders, organization, industry, company, society.

• Ask strategic questions.

• Challenge any assumptions you might have.

• Leaders do not delegate accountability down the chain, but continually look for systemic issues/processes which are barriers to success (rather than blaming and faulting the parts - the people and things that support the system).

• People are responsible for the commitments they make.

Four questions about the decision you're making:

• AIM: What are we trying to accomplish together? 

• METHOD: By what method? 

• CUSTOMERS: Who are we serving?

• MEASURES: How will we measure progress and success? Do not focus your measures on individuals who are only part of the system.Stay away from the culture of accountability which is closely tied to blame and fear

Five key questions for managing data-driven decisions:

• What bugs you?

   

   

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• What is repetitive about what bugs you?
• How will you know if a change is an improvement?
• What changes can you make that will result in an improvement? 

Adopt the BOHICA principle, which assumes that a minority are early-adopting Explorers (who embrace change readily) and Pioneers (solid adopters, more cautious before adopting change), the majority are Settlers (who take a wait and see stance), and the remaining are Cynics (unlikely to adopt change). The principle focuses on supporting the Explorers and Pioneers.

• The key to managing an organization/system is to look at data over time in context.