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#Leadership : It’s Not Enough to Make Good Decisions, You Need to Make Efficient Ones as Well…In Order to Streamline our Process, We Came Up with Several Different Levels of Involvement & Worked to Minimize Everyone’s Time Commitments Within our #KeyDecisions . We Came Up with Five Levels.

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One of the key lessons I’ve learned over the years as a founder, CEO, and business adviser is that it’s not enough to make good decisions; you need to make good decisions efficiently. Bad decisions are never good, but it’s just as bad to make good decisions late.

The fact is that business is full of decisions. Effective executives and effective leadership teams learn how to make tens, if not hundreds, of decisions every week to keep the business running well and growing. They do this by applying the right amount of energy, brain power, and focus required for each decision and not an ounce more.

As a CEO, one of the key moves I made for company growth was to establish a leadership team within my company. This was the team I worked with to think through the bigger issues and the team that became responsible for key departments. I realized I couldn’t do everything myself. I needed more input and insights into where to steer the business.

However when I first established this team, I made a critical mistake. I assumed that everyone should be involved in all of decisions. I made a long list with copious notes and called our first meeting with all of the senior team members. The first few decisions felt good because everyone was included. We had good discussion, and we found directions that everyone stood behind.

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What Skill Sets do You have to be ‘Sharpened’ ?

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The problem was that we only had completed three or four items over the course of two hours and we had over fifty items on the list. Clearly, this wasn’t going to work going forward. I realized that I needed to find a way to make both good decisions, and also make them in the limited time we had available.

In order to speed things up, we decided that not everyone needed to be involved at the same level for every decisions. For some decisions, certain people needed to be at the table to discussion, but for other decisions we just needed to collect information from a few people.

In order to streamline our process, we came up with several different levels of involvement and worked to minimize everyone’s time commitments within our key decisions. We came up with five levels.

Input

For many decisions, we needed to collect information from several sources for input into the process. We learned that while gathering the information was critical, the key executives who provided the information didn’t need to be part of the process. Once we had the information, they could go back to other work. This worked well for staffing and planning.

Collaborate

At times, we realized that we needed certain people at the table to discuss options and think through scenarios and possible outcomes. It was more than input, so we made it a higher level of involvement. We used this for deciding project team leads and new clients.

Make

One of the best things we did was get super clear on who was actually going to make a decision. Generally we got it down to one person. They took in all of the data, considered all of the options, and applied all of the criteria discussed to make the final choice. Our rule here was to have the person who was closest to the issue make the decision when possible. What we found eventually is that the person closest to the issue and the person who was going to have to live with the decisions were the best people to put in this role.

Approve

As CEO, I realized that I needed to delegate a lot of decisions if I was going to free myself up to focus on more strategic tasks and to empower the team. However, there were some things I still wanted to give a final blessing to before they were implemented. The rule was that I couldn’t change the decision, I could only approve or vote it. It freed up my time immensely and developed my team’s leadership skills.

Inform

This was a powerful move for the team. We realized that many people were coming to the table just so they could hear the discussion and learn what the final resolution was. Rather than having them sit through the meetings, we promised to take notes, record final decisions, and distribute them to the right people in a timely manner. This greatly reduced the people who needed to be at the meeting.

Once we had these levels defined and agreed to, we found the best strategy was to push people from the middle to the edges, to either to input or inform, if we could. We generally tried to only have one person make the decision and then I would often take approve simply to coordinate with strategy and longer term planning.

Now as a business coach, decision making is one of the main things I help leadership teams get right. The key is to balance quality with efficiency and to know when you’ve hit the “good enough” point so you can move forward onto the next decisions quickly and confidently.

Post Written by Bruce Eckfeldt : Bruce Eckfeldt is a five-time Inc 5000 CEO, Certified Gazelle’s Business Growth Coach, and President-Elect of the NYC chapter of EO

 

FastCompany.com | June 6, 2018

Your #Career : How to Successfully #ChangeCareers ……Change is Never Easy, Particularly if you are Trying to Move into an Entirely New Field. But #Change isn’t Impossible. You can Successfully Transition into a #NewCareer, Granted you are Committed to It.

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Change is never easy, particularly if you are trying to move into an entirely new field. But change isn’t impossible. You can successfully transition into a new career, granted you are committed to it.

“It is possible to transition into a new job but it takes time and work,” says Catherine Palmiere, president of Adam Personnel, Inc. “Sometimes people make a jump and they haven’t done their due diligence.”

Change never happens overnight, and that is especially true of career change. You can’t wake up one day and say you want to trade your accounting job for a position as a fitness trainer and think it will happen quickly. Not only do you need to research the profession you are aspiring to but you have to see what type of education or certificates are needed.

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But even doing that isn’t enough. You also have to look inward and make sure you have the skills and personality needed to make the move successfully. “Someone with great computer skills that’s in the financial service business that wants to move to the cloud platform will have a much easier transition then a financial services worker that wants to be a social worker,” says Palmiere.

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What Skill Sets do You have to be ‘Sharpened’ ?

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According to Mary Foley, Senior Sourcing Specialist for IT Talent at Progressive, people looking to switch careers should consider their passions and interests outside the office and think about ways to apply that to a new career. While you may know exactly what you want to do in your new career, for those that want to switch but aren’t sure into what it pays to take one of the many skill assessment tests available over the Web or rely on a self-assessment to figure out where your are strong and what areas you are weak in. After all, if you are not a people person than it’s doubtful that you will succeed in a customer servicerole.

“The key to remember when it comes to career transitions to make one very small step at a time,” says Alexandra Levit, business and workplace consultant and Career Advisory Board member. “Do a lot of investigation behind the scenes but don’t quit your day job.”

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Levit says a great way to kick the tires and make contacts is to find a mentor or mentors in the field or job you want to work in. Those people are in the trenches day in and day out and will be a plethora of information about what it’s really like.  Finding mentors can be easily done thanks to the Internet. Levit says to use online tools like LinkedIn to zero-in on the people you would want to meet in the field you are eyeing.

Once you have a list of targets, ask them if they have time for a ten or 15-minute informational interview. If you get the interview, you’ll be able to pick their brain and forge a relationship with the person or people. That could translate into a job down the road if you are front and center in their mind when an opening comes up.

Can’t or won’t find a mentor, then consider volunteering. If you always dreamed of working in a museum but ended up in the back office of a financial firm then volunteer at one. According to Levit not many people think of volunteering not only as a way to learn about a job but to get their feet wet and adds skills to their resume.

Once you’ve amassed the necessary skills and have the network in place it’s time to start sending out resumes. While a career transition can be handled in different ways via the resume, career experts say you want to focus on your transferable skills and less about the chronological order of your previous positions.

One way to do that is to go with a functional resume that lists all your skills at the top and then at the bottom has your past jobs in chronological order. “Functional resumes are controversial because people will think you are trying to hide something,” says Levit. “As long as you show your career trajectory at some point the functional resume could cause them to take a second look instead of tossing it in the garbage.”

The last thing you want to do is randomly send out resumes and hope you will get a call back. Instead, Palmiere says you have brand yourself by reaching out to the decision makers.  That could mean sending a letter or email to the top person in the company you want to work for and bypassing the HR department altogether.

If you do decide to send a letter or email make sure to research the company and the person you are reaching out to. You want to show that you’ve done your homework and have real reasons to want to work there whether it’s because you believe in the company’s mission or the CEO’s philanthropic work has had such an impact on you.

 

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