A635.2.3.RB - How Companies Can Make Better Decisions

My reflection blog this week is to reflect on the interview with Marcia Blenko about effective decision making in an organization. In Blenko’s interview, she talks about how her company has conducted a large amount of research and there is some positive correlation between the companies’ effectiveness on making decisions and employee engagement. Blenko discussed that there are four elements of good decision making and leader skills and behaviors could impact decision-making. This blog will talk about employee engagement impacts effective decision making, issues with making decisions and determine if there are elements missing from Blenko’s decision making concept. My blog will address this information from a standpoint of being a new leader within an organization that has endured a new organizational structure over the past year and decision-making is challenged by change.

Elements of good Decisions

            Blenko discussed that there are four elements to good decision making: Quality, Speed, Yield and Effort. I found it interesting when I researched further into the elements that this is actually a formula where a “Decision score = Quality x Speed x Yield – Effort” and being a data driven person I wanted to understand her analysis a bit more. The quality element of making a good decision is determined on good decisions made more often than not. I struggled with how one could actually measure quality as an element of good decision making because quality concept, itself, is a very large topic with many different integrated factors such as product efficiency, company return on investment and customer satisfaction. The speed element is based on how fast an organization changes their action into a decision, while yield is how long it takes the company to see a return on that decision. (Murali, 2010)

            From my perspective, the four elements of decision-making are a simple formula that focuses on speed and yield as the driving factors. I have been in my new role as a fleet scheduler for our sustainment organization for two months where my job is to manage all schedules for aircraft maintenance, including where employees where travel to.  The team was extremely unorganized and there was not a single schedule in place for the fleet. Employees on the team had their own schedules using various software tools and there was zero integration. The moral seemed to be tense and frustrating and the culture was reactive. Therefore, in order to deliver a quality product, speed and yield were critical in my ability to create a product that was trustworthy and respected. My personal risk was not knowing team requirements and employee skillsets. After two months on the job, I experienced my first aha moment this past week while sitting in a finance review, the finance manager stopped the meeting and told the team that my schedule is a good product because we can now see where we are on status of projects. Additionally, the team members who are deployed are not calling me directly to provide their individual travel plans and what the changes are in their effort. I have successfully built quality product that is improving morale and confidence. My decision making was simple because I focused on quality and it wasn’t until I listened to this video did I realize that speed and yield were also a factor in the process. Because our organization was so chaotic, the right decisions and timeliness of those decisions were critical in implementing a process that obtained immediate results. The process and product brought out the good and bad of others. We found out one of our employees was riding the system and was not performing in comparison to his counterpart, basically one person was performing 2 to 1 in aircraft completions. One employee was slacking and the other was being overworked, forcing leadership to re-balance the workload.  

            In conclusion to the four elements, I agree with Blenko that her four elements are critical to making good decisions. The issue is there are other factors such as risk and human factors that do not come into play when making overall decisions. I would assume that too much speed could cause a bad decision or little speed could jeopardize the ability to meet a demand. There has to be a good balance and understanding that balance would determine whether the decision is effective or not.

Impediments to good decision Making

            There are always factors that are good or bad to decision-making, such as fear. Making decisions, especially in my new role, there is the fear that I may not make the right decision or I may have some pre-assumption that the team will not support me because I am not an aircraft maintainer or know anything about our military customer. It took me about a month to convince my team that I had a specialized skillset not only from working at Lockheed Martin but my historical performance as a maintenance scheduler in the military for twenty years. There was an incident over the last week where I was discussion to the team that in order for the military to request additional work on an aircraft there was a form that had to be submitted, reviewed, and processed. This form is basically an agreement. A leader challenged me as if I did not know what I was talking about. I immediately rattled out the military process number and section that defined this process in detail and why were were not requiring our customer to use their own process is a deterrent to our ability to make good decisions. About an hour later this leader showed up to my desk and thanked me as he was not aware of the process. Blenko talked about ones’ skills or behaviors being an impediment to making good decisions. As a leader we cannot be afraid of confronting things that may be uncomfortable or perceived to be uncomfortable, especially when we are confident in our own abilities. In this scenario, I am very confident in what I know about scheduling aircraft maintenance and I will continue to build trust within my new team to help them grow to make better decisions as well. (Lifland, 2017)

Employee engagement

Blenko did argue that decision effectiveness correlates positively with employee engagement and organizational performance. Encouraging employees to be a part of decision making process creates a culture of ownership and accountability. As an employee, I know I have always felt valued when I was asked to contribute to an an idea. If that input created a good result it would boost my internal confidence to participate in the future and the confidence of my leadership being able to ask me to participate. If I personally provided input that created a negative result, I know my conscience would bother to the point I would take extra steps to make sure I did everything I could to make it better. As a leader, we don’t have all the answers and here are times we need to engage our technical experts to ensure we understand all aspect of the decision we are trying to make. My personal experience has never been making decision in a vacuum without consulting others because usually I don’t feel one person’s cannot make large critical decisions without providing inclusion of the team and gaining buy-in from the team usually automatically gains their support. Buy-in from your team generally creates a higher quality of moral that supports quality, speed, yield and speed. Employee engagement also removes the ability of the team to singly blame leadership for all decisions that are made as they are part of that decision, good or bad. (Stark, 2017)

Lessons Learned

            What I gained from this exercise that I can use in my career is the value of employee engagement. I really had not thought that speed and yield were a true factor that is calculated into decision making but it make sense. Decisions that are made in the organization and the speed and type of action that are made have an impact on employees and their ability to confidently do their jobs. It is very important to reach out to your employees and allow them to be a part of decisions because it gives them a level of ownership and accountability. I feel Blenko thoughts on decision making is very generic and you have to take into consideration associated risks and the human factors that are associated with the outcome of decisions being made. I did go out and purchase Marcia Blenko’s’ book “Decide & Deliver: 5 Steps to Breakthrough Performance in Your Organization” as I would like to know more about the five steps verses what was outlined in the YouTube video. As a new leader of a team, I think this is good material to read and gain a more in-depth understanding of her written material.

References

Blenko, M. (2010, October 23). How Companies Can Make Better Decisions, Faster. Retrieved August 18, 2017, from YouTube: https://erau.instructure.com/courses/65016/assignments/1072219#submit

Lifland, S. (2017). Retrieved August 18, 2017, from American Management Association: http://www.amanet.org/training/articles/overcoming-the-barriers-to-decision-making.aspx

Murali, D. (2010, November 22). Four components of decision effectiveness. Retrieved August 18, 2017, from The Hindu: http://www.thehindu.com/books/Four-components-of-decision-effectiveness/article15718415.ece

Stark, P. B. (2017). 6 Reasons to Involve Employees in Decision Making. Retrieved August 18, 2017, from Peter Barron Stark Companies: https://www.peterstark.com/key-to-engagement/#