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Security Management
home page > Unit 4: Planning & decision making
Management's Role in Effective Decision Making (continued)
Support
for risk taking:
Need to create a climate that encourages risk taking.- one way is "modeling" risk-taking behavior -- both demonstrating the behavior and showing they accept failure as the price of taking risk.
- must also emphasize the positive aspects of risk taking: get employees to share concerns about risk, and to take steps that improve employees' self-confidence, attitudes, and self-esteems.
- show that employees won't be punished or abandoned if they fail. Especially true for younger workers, who are likely to fail more often due to lack of experience.
- managers can't ignore mistakes,
but must lead a process that will learn from them.
- Army's
"Lessons Learned"
program is a good model for this.
- Can also increase level of risk
taking by the risk's "terminal
value": "the value that survives a project to benefit
other .. projects" (Case and Shane, 1998). Because of these
values, organization is more likely to take on a risky project,
because there will still be benefit even if it fails to achieve
primary goal.Those values could include:
- what the organization learned from project
- changes in interdepartmental relationship
- building employees' competence
- Managerial attitudes and
decision success
- Harrison and Pelletier (1995) model for decision success argues that decision success is a function of managerial attitudes: if the measure of success is unreasonable, there's no chance of attaining it, and people won't buy in.
- need to also have an open process, so that stakeholders are constantly considered and consulted, in order to get their buy-in
- "Managers should not take a judgmental approach to the success of the decisions, based on the fact that all decisions have a degree of uncertainty." That means that all decisions may be imperfect and that's a reality.
- Seek satisfactory outcomes, and evaluate in terms of whether they met decisions' objectives realistically (taking into account the fact that decisions are made without 100% knowledge in advance).
- Shared
vision:
- if employees don't understand the vision, they can't make effective decisions.
- Vision statement is not same
as a mission statement:
- mission statement: what the organization does, and focuses on services, key customers, products
- vision statement: provides structure and direction for decision makers. Without it, there's lack of direction, apathy.
- Factors to consider (Brown,
1998):
- must give employees a picture of where company wants to be
- be brief, so it can be easily recalled
- verifiable: so individuals can agree whether or not it has been met
- focused on, at most, 1-2 elements of company or major goals
- purpose is to communicate company's direction, so all employees must understand it
- inspirational: to motivate employees