Decisions, Decisions

Often times the new or early-career senior technology manager has never been formerly trained in how to approach decision making. This results in the new manager approaching a major component of his management style either with a "gut" sense or by adopting the behaviors of other admired managers. Regardless, a senior executive has a responsibility to up his game through the execution of an intentional decision-making framework.

Decision-making scenarios can be broken down into the following framework elements:

·         Command decision: The manager communicates (perhaps by omission) to the team that the burden of the decision solely rests in the manager's chair, and that no input influencing the decision will be solicited from the team.

·         Consultative decision: The manager indicates that the final decision will be made by the manager, but a range of opinions and suggestions will be solicited from the team.

·         Delegated decision: The manager intentionally hands-off the manager's prerogative of making the decision to another individual.

·         Consensus decision: The manager will establish a process to either vet or purely facilitate a decision which ultimately rests in the consensus of the team.

 

Much of a manager’s style will be formed by which decision-making tactic a manager uses for everyday decisions. “Old school” managers will find themselves automatically using the command decision for most every circumstance. They don’t think about why they make decisions that way in the heat of the moment, but possibly they assume that executive managers by definition are characterized by command and control.

Another extreme is the management style that uses consensus decision-making for most everyday decision.  If these managers don’t think about why they always work this way, they may assume that their management style is to be a conciliator, or at an extreme, everyone’s friend.

In reality, every element in the decision-making framework has an appropriate use based on the scenario in which the decision arises. Who to hire, who to terminate, how  many resources to allocate to a project, or how to celebrate a product launch might all call for a different way to approach how common variety decisions should be made.