Adoption of management decisions is one of the most important stages of management activity. It is impossible to talk about the successful operation of the company without knowledge of competent approaches to making managerial decisions, because the slightest uncertainty in them can lead to tragic consequences.
Approaches to strategic decision-making
The person making decisions uses his knowledge, intuition, judgments, rationality, the decision reflects the worldview of the individual. Therefore, the adoption of managerial decisions is viewed as a psychological process. The following approaches to decision-making stand out.
- Intuitive. In this case, the decision is made on the basis of the sensations of the individual, without analyzing the pros and cons. Usually, this approach is peculiar to people who already have considerable managerial experience, their intuition rarely fails. Although the point here is probably not in it, but in the typical behavior of the environment, the manager simply knows what can be expected of him. But statistics show that blindly rely on intuition (knowledge) is not worth it, otherwise you can seriously make a mistake with the choice of strategy, so the intuitive approach is recommended to be combined with other decision-making methods.
- Based on judgments. This choice is conditioned by the accumulated experience and knowledge of a person. Logic in such a solution is seen, and the advantages of this approach is the cheapness and quickness of the assessment of the situation. But it is worth remembering that not all situations are repeated from time to time, and under completely new conditions this approach will not work - the manager does not know what to do next, because earlier he did not encounter such a situation.
- Rational. This technology of development of decisions does not depend on the intuition of the leader and his experience, here the strict calculation prevails. To implement a rational approach, the solution must go through the following stages:
- Diagnosis of the problem;
- formulation of criteria and limitations for decision making;
- identification of alternative solutions;
- evaluation of alternatives;
- the final choice of the solution.
Collegial and individual methods of decision-making
There are two ways of making a decision: collegiate and individual. The latter method is justified in those cases when the manager faces fairly simple tasks or the risk is relatively small. But with the complexity of management tasks (enlargement of production), this method of decision making becomes ineffective because of its subjectivity.
Therefore at large enterprises the collegial method of decision-making is most often used. It is more objective and allows you to take into account all the factors that affect the company. But collective decision-making has a significant drawback - a low level of efficiency. This method can be divided into four subspecies.
- Decision-making by the simple majority method. This is a well-known vote for all of us, the rules are extremely simple - as most believe, the head will do the same. The disadvantage is that the minority's opinion is not taken into account and it can be dangerous - genius ideas usually generate a small number of individuals. In addition, this method does not allow to take into account the motivation of the members of the group (why they vote for this decision), and therefore the level of rationality here will be quite low.
- Strategy of summation of ranks. The solution will correspond to an alternative that has received a lower amount of ranks.
- Strategy for minimizing deviations. Its essence lies in making the differences between the views of the majority and the minority minimal.
- The strategy of optimal foresight. In this case, the group decision takes into account individual preferences, which actually exist. The more often the leader arrives according to the proposed solution, the more optimal the strategy is.
Well, of course, do not forget that to properly analyze problems and evaluate the solution, you need appropriate information support. Without it, the adoption of managerial decisions is doomed to failure - without knowing full information, it is impossible to see the right development strategy.