What Skills Must You Have In Order To Succeed In Your Business

Research carried out by Ashridge Management College's Phil Hodgson suggests that managers who use their intuition effectively and continuously are likely to have a number of clear characteristics:

• They make decisions quickly and confidently; they are willing to back their judgment and don't spend large periods of time weighing things up.
• They use data only when necessary - not for them the computer print-out containing every single statistic available.
• They recognize intuition as a skill, part of their managerial armory.
• They accept and encourage ideas whatever their source or apparent usefulness, at every stage.
• They act on intuitive judgments, rather than questioning them.
• They accept no rigid or wrong method of doing things - if something feels, looks or seems right they will do it.
  

The fashionable solution to some of these problems is to organize people into teams. The theory is that more brains make for better decisions, but, in practice, it is not always the case. Juries, for example, make mistakes. In a group of people there is an assumption that somewhere along the line someone will come up with the right decision. Even if you sit back at the relevant meetings and look into the distance, someone will be making copious notes and will guide everyone along to the right decision. This system makes everyone feel better. They can take the credit for good ideas, even though they were dozing steadily at the time, and distance themselves from the bad ones ('I fought them long and hard over that one, but they insisted it went in, now look what's happened').



Another potentially dangerous assumption is that experience automatically leads to learning and, therefore, better decision-making. Of course, experience is inevitable whether it is good, bad or indifferent. Simply going into work to do the same job in the same way year after year gives us an ability to make the right sort of decisions. At a simple level this is true. Some decisions are basic and automatic. But what if they are ever so slightly out of the ordinary? Experience may well be inevitable; the trouble is that learning is not. Someone might have had the same job for 30 years and still have only one year's experience 30 times. If you don't audit the effectiveness of your decisions, how are you to know if they have been successful or that you are a good decision-maker?

In the real world of compromise and incompetence, other thinkers have concluded that the decisions we reach are rarely the most rational. In fact, many are entirely irrational, reliant on hunches and instincts even we don't understand. Some managers appear to have built their entire careers on such decisions. In their book, if you have come up with complex calculations to justify a decision it's probably the wrong one in the first place. If you are in business you simply can't wait for information to determine everything. Instead, many blunder off down the most ill-advised route conceivable and sometimes happen upon the solution.

There are a host of lists suggesting how to become a good decision-maker. Few are foolproof, but most boil down to the following six stages to a perfect decision.

1. What's your objective? If you don't know what you want or what you need to solve, you are unlikely to make the best decision for your business.
2. What's involved? You need to consider the elements involved in the decision. Who will it affect and how?
3. What are the possible solutions? Canvass opinions and gather information so you know the full range of options which you can choose from. Don't discount any too early in your thinking and don't focus narrowly on what you think the solution should be.
4. Make your decision - Plump for a particular option, having carefully weighed up the pros and cons.
5. Present it to others - What do other people think of the decision. Check their feelings and misgivings. Do you still think you are right?
6. Make it happen - Implement the decision.

It is all perfectly logical and, if you are caught in the relentless hurly burly of business life, probably totally impossible to implement. No-one could be that perfect! But when it comes to major decisions, you do need some sort of process to get it right. Otherwise you run the risk of decisions which not everyone supports and ones that are plain wrong.