All Articles Leadership How effectively does your organization choose the best decision-making style for a given decision?

How effectively does your organization choose the best decision-making style for a given decision?

1 min read

Leadership

SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Leadership — tracks feedback from more than 190,000 business leaders. We run the poll question each week in our e-newsletter.

Last week, we asked: How effectively does your organization choose the best decision-making style for a given decision?

  • Very effectively — we’re deliberate about choosing the right style: 5.78%
  • Effectively — we choose the right style most of the time: 32.13%
  • Not very effectively — we gravitate toward one style irrespective of the decision being made: 43.32%
  • What’s a decision-making style?: 18.77%

Different decisions require different styles.  Organizations tend to gravitate toward a single decision making style.  Whether it’s autocratic, consensus-based, participatory, or democratic, organizations find a style that’s comfortable as a default.  The problem is that many times it’s exactly the wrong style for a given decision.  The better you understand the 4 decision making styles, the more effectively you can apply them to make better and faster decisions.

Mike Figliuolo is managing director of thoughtLEADERS, author of “Lead Inside the Box: How Smart Leaders Guide Their Teams to Exceptional Results” and “One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership.”