Corporate decision making: Ofosuhene offers useful lessons
Problem-solving and decision-making are important skills for business and life. Problem-solving often involves decision-making, and decision-making is especially important for management and leadership.
Advertisement
And this resonates so well with the thinking of the Chief Executive Officer of Bond Savings and Loans Limited, Mr George Ofosuhene, who spoke on the topic: ‘Decision-making,’ when he appeared on Springboard, Your Virtual University, on Joy FM - on its June 7 edition show.
It was part of the new series, dubbed: “Entrepreneurship and Business Growth,” which started on May 3 this year and aims at equipping listeners with the relevant information in the realms of entrepreneurship.
“Someone who cannot make a decision is not fit to be a leader. Sometimes, you might procrastinate because you want some more information. But no decision is bad decision! The cost of procrastination is unthinkable!” he told the host of the show, Rev. Albert Ocran.
“Matching 'boundarylessnes' and speed is helped by the quality of information a corporate leader gets. Surround yourself with quality people. You need to have people who can process information before they bring it to you for decision-making.”
“Corporate leaders should take decisions and not process the information. It boils down to capability in terms of the people who are around you. Get the right people so that you don't end up not achieving anything,” he said.
Achieving the intended purpose
While stressing that leaders who could not make decisions were obviously bad in their respective fields, he explained that decisions must not be made in a vacuum but must be arrived at after one has carefully thought through what those decisions were meant to achieve.
"Anytime you are confronted with a situation and you need to make a decision, you always have an objective in mind. Now, that objective can be achieved if you have the right tools and information. So, if at the end you do not achieve what you are looking for, then it means the decision-making process has not gone the way you expected."
“In decision-making, you must understand what you're doing. Don't copy other people because then your premise will be wrong. Therefore your objective and outcome will be wrong. Having good quality information makes decision-making better,” he said.
Other Trending Stories
As a result, he said it was important for people to cultivate and nurture the habit of always having the right information, which enables them to make the right decisions.
He explained that decisions could only be described as good if they achieved the intentions for which they were taken and bad for when their objectives were not met.
To help ensure that decisions achieved their intended purposes, Mr Ofosuhene said leaders needed to ensure that the premises of their decisions - the objectives for which they are taken - were always right else they risked becoming a failure.
"If you have good quality information (about what you want to achieve), the chances of you making a wrong decision are slimmer. Now, my issue is, how sure are you that the information available to you is actually good," he asked, stressing that quality information was vital to the corporate decision-making process.
Ingredients of a corporate decision-making process
Touching on the factors that one must consider in taking a decision, the CEO of the Bond Financial Services said in addition to identifying the objective of the decision to be taken, leaders also needed to anticipate the implications of their decisions.
"The implications because every decision that you take will have certain implications on the business environment," he said.
He added that options available to the leader during the decision-making process also needed to be considered, explaining that those options helped serve as opportunity cost in the decision-making process.
Hidden biases
Even though the complex and biased nature of human beings generally make it difficult for leaders to take certain decisions, Mr Ofosuhene explained that developing the right human relations could help in making the right decision.
"It is not advisable to go to the boardroom without having a hand on how things are going to play out and related to that is what I always say; that everybody needs to have good communication skills. You see, every single human being can be managed; it doesn't matter who he or she is. What you have to do is to ensure that you engage each of them and get them to understand you," he said, in response to a question on how people can navigate through split board and executive management meetings.
“If you want to make good decisions as a person, you must know yourself; beliefs, assumptions, trigger points etc. Focus on the big picture. Don't tilt things in the favour of a stakeholder. But don't burn bridges. Don't trample on people's beliefs and faith. Understand and appreciate how to deal with such biases,” he said.
Beyond that, he said leaders also needed to be flexible in making decisions, explaining, "Lack of flexibility can actually lead to a bad decision because you are only looking at things from a certain point. Flexibility brings in other ideas that can be used in the decision-making process," he said.
Asked what leaders should do when faced with two options that are almost of the same good quality, Mr Ofosuhene said situations of that nature called for the use of experience, intuition and gut feelings; such attributes, he said, could be built and nurtured overtime. “Intuition and experience help you make a decision between two seemingly good decisions.”
Advertisement
"Those are invaluable and that's why before you get to a certain point, you are expected to have gone through the mill. The process of going through the mill ensures that your intuition, experience and gut feelings are always right," he said.