Decision Making Style

• What is often called leadership style is really decision making style.
• Autocratic leaders make their own decisions while participative leaders involve others in making decisions.
  
• Supposedly, good leaders vary their decision making style according to the situation.
• They make decisions unilaterally or use a degree of participation as appropriate.
• A participative style should be used whenever employee commitment is required.
• But commitment is nearly always critical - except with trivial decisions.
• Also, commitment is harder to obtain with confident knowledge workers who scoff at arbitrary authority and don't respond unless involved.
• Unilateral decisions must be made on occasion, especially when time is short. Management is very much like investment which calls for the making of smart decisions to get the best return out of all resources at the managers disposal.
• Important decisions are increasingly made on a partnership basis - multiple expert input.
• Today's managers need to think more about how they can coach employees and facilitate the making of sound decisions from those best positioned to make them.
• Top executives who appear to be making unilateral decisions are, more often than not, only pulling together multiple inputs from others.
• In any case, there is a choice to make - decide or lead. When the boss decides, that is not leading. When the decision is fully democratic, no leadership has occurred.
• It is only when someone explicitly tries to persuade the group to make a particular decision that leadership is shown.
• Leadership style is therefore really management style or simply decision making style.

Backwards Decision Making

• The "rational" manager thinks...decides...acts - in that order.
• Real world decision making is not that rational or linear.
• Trial and error action often occurs first, followed by reflection, and only then a decision.
• It's like house hunting - you start with some criteria, but revise them once you have seen features in houses that you hadn't thought of in adance.
• Decision making in such cases is a process of discovery rather than one of prior thought before doing anything.
• Consider Honda executives riding around on small motorbikes when they first arrived in California and, seeing how bystanders reacted, started selling them.
• Managers don't admit the blind alleys they blunder down before arriving at decisions.
• So they pretend to arrive at decisions solely through reason.
• We often like to try something before we make our minds up about it
• The best decisions often occur only after several mistakes are made.
• By pretending otherwise, managers perpetuate the myth of rational decision making.
• This makes it extremely difficult for anyone to admit mistakes.
• If you feel ashamed because you don't make decisions in the ideally rational way, your confidence could be undermined.
• This feeling will only make you more resolved to keep up the pretence.
• The morale of the story is to start celebrating backwards decision making.
• This means admitting the blind alleys we pursue enroute to decisions.
• Entrepreneurial behaviour calls for more risk taking and improvisation anyway.
• Struggling to think it all through  in advance of trial and error action is too risk averse.
• Research shows that people who make decisions instinctively often make better decisions than those who painstakingly gather all the facts before committing themselves.

Can management shed its negative image, be reinvented for the 21st century and differentiated from leadership? See Leadership and Management Reinvented. Also 21st Century Management.

We have an ideal image of leaders that actually says more about us and our needs than it does about leadership.

Do you think leadership should be redefined for a knowledge-driven world? Is our current concept of leadership not working? Is there room for heroic leadership today or is it now all about post-heroic leadership? Is emotional intelligence essential for leadership? Is leadership a role, like being a CEO?

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Challenging conventional thinking about leadership

See LEAD2XL for latest articles on leadership by Mitch McCrimmon