Several years ago I set my kitchen on fire and almost burned my house down. Some of you have heard the story. After the dust and smoke settled, literally, I learned some very valuable lessons.
One of the lessons was acknowledging the importance of good and relevant decision making. I was attempting to make a complex meal for my wife and kids. At least it was complex for me. It back fired. Afterwords, my wife reminded me to keep it simple. The family would have been happy with a grilled steak and perhaps a baked potato. I wasn’t exercising good decision making because, although I was trying to do something nice for my family and wife, I didn’t really consider what really mattered to them. I didn’t know the truth about the kind of meal they would most enjoy. I took it upon myself, my instinct and personal preference when deciding what to cook.
We often do the same thing in business. Making the right decisions and choices is fundamental to building a successful organization.
And yet, we often make those decisions based on guessing, applying our personal preferances or being entirely subjective.
Further, we expect our employees to make good decisions also. It is difficult to ensure that our people will be effective in decision making if it is based on intuition an subjectivity.
We need a principle to guide us in how to approach effective decison making in business. The Level 7 Principle of Knowing What’s True addresses this issue.
The Level 7 Principle of Knowing What’s True establishes a culture that suggests the business become objective in its assessment of performance and factors that may impact decisions.
If I had asked my family in advance what they would prefer for dinner, at least I would have known the truth about what mattered to them. Even though I burned the dinner. (Oh you have not idea how much I burned it) My kids probably wouldn’t have eaten the meal anyway. I was wasting my time because I made a bad choice what to cook.
Without objectivity in business we will make bad decisions. Yes, we won’t always be correct in everything, but with the Level 7 Principle of Knowing What’s True we will dramatically minimize our mistakes.
Implementation Tip of the Week
1- Make a list of the areas of your business where your objective decision making is critical. Here are some areas you will probably look at:
- Overall company performance
- Customer Satisfaction
- Employee Morale
- Employee Performance
- Sales Conversion Figures
- Lead Generation Results
- Market and Industry Opportunities
2- Determine how you are currently gathering the information. If you are not collecting accurate data in an area, develop your system in order to produce quality information.
3- Establish a schedule to review the information on a regular basis and make adjustments to your systems as needed.
4- Begin to think objectively about all your decision making and performance assessment. Ask yourself, “how do we know that what we are thinking is true?” For example, if you are assessing an employees performance, you need to be looking at tangible performance numbers rather than subjectively assessing if they are really producing or not.
Get more detail on the Level 7 Principle of Knowing What’s True in the Level 7 Manifesto. Click here to get a copy.