One of the most frequently used and effective decision making techniques can be summarized in the following 7 steps.

Step 1: Identify the problem/situation for whicj you need to make a Decision. What exactly is the problem, for which you need a Decision to be made?Step 2: Collect information based on different parameters. This step can also be called as collecting the facts and impacts of the problem?

Step 3: Identify the various possiblities. Prepare a list of the possiblities the problem can be solved and rate each possiblities between 1 to 5 in terms of its consequences on your Decision.

Step 4: Evaluate each possiblities in terms of its consequences. Use your standards and judgement criteria to determine the cons and pros of each alternative.

Step 5: Determine the best Option/possiblities you enlisted in step 5. This is much easier after you go through the above preparation steps.

Step 6: Evaluate the outcome of your decision. ]]> http://corporateskills.co.uk/managerial-skills/easy-steps-for-decision-making/feed/ 0 http://corporateskills.co.uk/managerial-skills/the-five-leadership/ http://corporateskills.co.uk/managerial-skills/the-five-leadership/#comments Wed, 11 Jun 2008 09:54:36 +0000 Naveed Rahmat http://www.corporateskills.co.uk/?p=72 There are whole libraries full of things that tell you what to do about leadership and how to remember what’s important. Here’s another short edition to that library – the 5 P’s of leadership. They are:

• Pay Attention to What’s Important
• Praise What You Want to Continue
• Punish What You Want to Stop
• Pay for the Results You Want
• Promote the People Who Deliver Those Results

Pay Attention To What’s Important

Time management courses, strategy books, and management gurus all will tell you that there’s not a lot that’s really important. Your job as a leader is to concentrate on what’s most important so that it gets taken care of. Then let the rest of the stuff take care of itself.

Now if you’re a perfectionist, that’s going to be hard for you to do. But there’s not P for perfectionism in this scheme of things. No, we recognize that there are limited resources of time, energy, people, and money. Because those resources are limited, you want to go for the big stuff first.

What you’re after is the 20% of stuff that gives you the biggest bang for the buck. What underlies all of this is something called Pareto’s Law. Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian Economist and Sociologist in the late 19th century. He formulated something he called “The Law of the Unequal Distribution of Results.” You probably know it as the 80/20 rule.

All the 80/20 rules says is that there’s 20% of the stuff you do that gets you 80% of the results. The trick is finding that 20%. Once you’ve found it you then have to pay attention to it.

Pay attention to it in your written and oral communications. Restate the key themes over and over. Don’t undervalue repetition, repetition makes for memory and memory makes for action.

Pay attention to it in your casual contacts. John Kotter, in his book to general managers, pointed out that effective general managers make great use of the random contacts they have with people. Those contacts could be in the hallway, at the water cooler, in the elevator, or walking down the street. The seize on those moments to talk about the things and ask the questions that are important to their leadership agenda. You should do that too.

Organize you day, your communications, your organizational structures, your reward systems and everything else to pay attention to what’s important and then do that with unremitting diligence.

Praise What You Want to Continue

Praise is your best training tool. In technical terms, praise is a positive consequence that follows a positive action. It’s a reward for something done right. Use praise to get people to continue to do things or to take positive action. That’s where it’s best used.

Remember, too, that praise is a tool that is most effective when it’s used inconsistently. Used consistently, praise tends to loose its force. So, don’t worry so much about praising everything that people do right, but do worry about praising.

That’s important, because most of us came up in a world where we didn’t praise enough. Seek out opportunities to praise but don’t get anal retentive about it.

Punish What You Want to Stop 

Punishment is the mirror image of praise. It’s a negative consequence that follows negative behavior. It follows a principle stated almost in biblical terms by one of my past trainees. She said: “the good shall be rewarded and the unjust shall be punished in proportion to their deeds.”

Punishment – negative consequences – are the tool you use to get people to stop stuff. If you figure out what’s most important for people to quit doing in your organization, rig up some kind of negative consequence for them if they do it. Be careful though, because you may fall prey to the hot stove guideline. It was Mark Twain (or if it wasn’t it should have been) who said, “A cat who sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again. But he won’t sit on a cold stove either.

The management lesson here is that if you zap people too much with negative consequences, they don’t just quit doing the stuff that you don’t want them to do. They quit doing pretty much everything. That’s why “rule by fear” and “controlled ferocity” cultures have a devil of a time getting people to take initiative. They’ve been zapped so often they’re just not willing to risk it.

Pay For the Results You Want

Years ago when I was managing distribution and customer service centers I happened to compliment one of the customer service reps. She immediately turned around to me and said, “Don’t just tell me, show me, payday is Friday.”

Pay is one of the tangible ways you can reward people for doing good stuff. It’s another form of praise in visible, tangible form. Don’t limit your thinking about pay to just money, though. Pay people with time off, recognition, choice assignments, small gifts, and special bonuses to encourage the behavior you want.

One of my clients used to carry around a pocket-full of restaurant gift certificates as he wandered around his trucking company. When he found somebody doing something that he wanted to encourage he was likely to whip out a gift certificate and hand it to them on the spot. It created the kind of event and drama that makes for good communication, and it encouraged positive behavior.

Another client of mine, a police chief this time, did something similar. She was a police chief in Texas, and, as you might expect, she talked like a Texan. She had little slips made up with one of her favorite phrases on them. It was, “’preciate ya.”

When she heard something about one of her officers that was positive, she sent them one of her ‘preciate ya slips. When she caught somebody done something she wanted to encourage she handed one out. Officers collected the slips and when they got enough, they got recognition in the department newsletter and some extra time off.

Look for ways to pay for the results you want. Pay and praise are the things that get the engine of progress going.

Promote People Who Deliver The Results You Want

This one just makes sense. The problem is that lots of organizations forget about it. They maintain reward and promotion systems that reward the old behavior, even while they’re trumpeting the new behavior in memo’s, meetings, and executive retreats.

When I was just starting out in consulting, a much more experienced and wiser consultant said to me, “When you first go into an organization, pay attention to who it is they promote. Listen to the stories that folks tell you about who gets promoted and rewarded and why. That will tell you just about everything you need to know about what the real organizational priorities are.”

What are the stories that your people tell in your organization? What are the stories they tell about their bosses? You want those stories to be positive about great things their bosses have done. If all the stories are negatives, buddy you’ve got a problem.

What do your folks say about the folks who are promoted? Do they feel they got promoted on merit because of their performance or because they just happened to “know somebody” or worse.

The five P’s of leadership will help you stay on track to positive organizational change. Remember to pay attention to what’s important, praise what you want to continue, punish what you want to stop, pay for the results you want, and promote the people who deliver those results and you’ll help your organization be the very best that it can become.

Employee Engagement is loosely defined as the level to which employees are fully involved in their work, committed to their work, care about their organisation and colleagues and are willing to extend themselves and go the extra mile for their company to ensure its success.

The Conference Board in the USA in its 2006 publication “Employee Engagement, A Review of Current Research and Its Implications”, describes employee engagement as “a heightened emotional connection that a employee feels for his or her organization that influences him or her to exert greater discretionary effort to his or her work.”

Employees can be broadly classified into three categories: -

Engaged: Engaged employees are enthusiastic about their jobs, loyal, motivated, committed and productive. They have a strong emotional allegiance to their workplace and are driven to succeed.

Not engaged: Not engaged employees are not totally psychologically connected to their company. They work hard and contribute but are less driven to succeed than their engaged counterparts and are more likely to engage in absentee behaviour and/or leave the company.

Actively disengaged: Actively disengaged employees are emotionally and cognitively divorced from their work, they have in a sense “checked out” although they are physically there. They are disgruntled, unhappy to be there and their negativity is palpable, infectious and disruptive for the organisation.

Why is Employee Engagement important?

Repeated research has shown that there is a direct correlation between the level of employee engagement in a company and the company’s overall financial and operational performance. Specifically, higher levels of engagement are associated with:-

1. More productivity

2. Better client servicing and happier customers

3. Less absenteeism

4. Lower turnover, more retention

5. Higher job satisfaction

6. Higher work morale

7. Higher levels of motivation

8. Higher levels of altruism and team spirit

9. Higher levels of loyalty and commitment to organisation

10. More pride in role and company

11. Higher propensity to take risk and innovate

12. Higher levels of energy and enthusiasm

The research evidence overwhelmingly indicates that the difference between engaged and disengaged employees is not insignificant and that engagement has become the best competitive advantage companies can leverage to propel their businesses forward. This is particularly true as economies shift towards knowledge economies and the workforce increasingly simulates a knowledge workforce vis-a-vis a labour workforce, with the associated shift in the balance of power. According to the 2006 Conference Board report, highly engaged employees outperform their disengaged colleagues by 20-28 percentage points. The benefits of having a workforce who have a high morale, are enthusiastic and love their work and tapping into the full reservoir of employee potential creativity and innovation cannot be overstated.

What Drives Employee Engagement?

Various factors influence employee engagement among them the following:-

1. Relationship with one’s direct manager

2. Opportunities for advancement and career development

3. Pride in the company

4. Clarity with respect to role and expectations

5. Clarity with respect to how one’s role is linked to company goals and performance

6. Culture of fairness and respect

7. Integrity and ethics of leadership

8. Availability of adequate coaching, mentoring and feedback

9. Team culture that nurtures trust and collaboration amongst coworkers

10. Nature of job and extent to which it is varied, interesting and stimulating

11. Sense of ownership and control over job and problems and their solutions

12. Sense of being valued and involved

13. Ability to participate in decision-making process

The Instititute for Employment Studies in its publication: The Drivers of Employee Engagement (Robinson D, Perryman S, Hayday S, April 2004) cites that based on research it undertook “the strongest driver of all is a sense of feeling valued and involved.” The 2006 Conference Board publication which summarized twelve major studies on employee engagement over the past 4 years by top research firms such as Gallup, Towers Perrin, Blessing White, the Corporate Leadership Council and others and came up with 26 key drivers of engagement defined the direct relationship with one’s manager as the strongest of all drivers.

How does a Company Increase Employee Engagement?

There is no shortcut towards creating and maintaining employee engagement, it takes commitment and an investment of time, effort and resources on the part of a company, but the payoff in terms of enhanced productivity, profitability and elevated morale is well worth it. As indicated in a 2003 Towers Perrin Talent Report: Working Today: Understanding What Drives Employee Engagement, “building engagement is a process that never ends. And it rests on the foundation of a meaningful and emotionally enriching work experience.”

The first step toward maximizing the level of engagement in a company is to set in place a mechanism to regularly measure and assess prevailing employee attitudes through comprehensive employee satisfaction surveys. Engagement levels are influenced by individual attitudes, propensities and characteristics so managers need to carefully gauge and consider what is most relevant and important for their own staff.

Management can then put in place the measures that bridge the gaps in employee engagement, in particular when it comes to:-

1. Giving employees an open forum to voice complaints, suggestions and questions

2. Adequately responding to employee grievances, issues and queries

3. Equipping employees with all the resources they need to perform their job well

4. Including employees in the problem-solving and decision-making process

5. Frequently enlisting employees opinions in important issues

6. Setting the highest standards of trust, integrity and ethics that employees can be proud of and emulate

7. Recognizing employees for their effort and performance publicly and privately

8. Rewarding employees for their efforts and contributions

9. Generating in employees a sense of ownership and pride

10. Providing a stimulating and challenging work environment

11. Demonstrating that management really values/ cares about employees’ wellbeing

12. Communicating how individual roles contribute to the organizational future

13. Providing opportunities for employees to grow and develop their full potential

Clearly an environment where employees are valued, respected, involved, challenged, have opportunities to grow and are clear about their roles and their contributions to the company’s goals and performance, is much more conducive to feelings of commitment and corporate citizenship amongst the workforce.

The 2007 Towers Perrin Study findings highlight three areas of focus for companies to increase engagement and tap the reservoir of employee discretionary effort.

1. Employees need their senior leaders to demonstrate inspiration, vision and commitment. Only 38% of employees surveyed felt senior management communicates openly and honestly, and just 44% agreed senior management tries to be visible and accessible.

2. Employees want to give more to their companies and their jobs, but also want a clearer picture of what’s in it for them.

3. Employees want to work for a company that is seen as a leader. A big part of what’s in it for employees is an organization’s reputation.

“At the end of the day”, said Julie Gebauer, Towers Perrin Managing Director, “our study paints a picture of a workforce that is energetic, ambitious and committed to working hard and giving its best. This lays to rest several persistent stereotypes: that employees are loyal only to themselves and their careers and are looking to do the minimum to get by. But turning people’s energy and ambition into engagement – and ultimately into significant performance lift – demands attention, focus and some very different behaviors from senior leaders, as well as clear follow-through on a number of organizational practices. The challenge for senior management is to recognize the value of employees’ untapped potential and to channel it in ways that yield real improvements in business performance.”

Regards…..

Muhammad Naveed Rahmat

Email: naveed.rahmat@gmail.com