The decision-making process involves a number of elements, and the most basic and crucial ones among them include the necessity of decision, orientation towards the future, conscious process, and choice between more than one alternative. The former implies that any managerial or even personal decision should be implementable in practice. Indeed, administrators should be aware beforehand to which extent the change is possible and whether they can influence the current situation. For example, supervisors’ decision to increase or decrease production quantity and quality may be useless as higher-level managers generally consider such questions based on overall company goals. Therefore, managers should be mindful of the scope of their responsibilities.
In addition, decisions should at all times include considerations regarding the future. In this respect, managers should evaluate the importance of each choice through its prospective effect. On the other hand, administrators need to avoid decisions that are oriented towards the past. In practice, it means that, for instance, leaders should not choose the punitive measures against workers based on a desire to retaliate for former mistakes but in search for better discipline in the future. As a result, such future-oriented decisions would ensure organizational development and flexibility in the face of new challenges.
Moreover, it is important that all the choices that managers make are conscious, as greater awareness of one’s actions leads to better decision-making. It signifies that managers should clearly understand the problem that necessitates a solution, elaborate on possible alternatives, choose the best option based on the information analysis, and adequately assess the results after the project is completed. For example, consider that a company faces increased costs due to significant numbers of defective products. Firstly, the manager determines the reason(s) that causes the issue, which is old machinery. Then, he/she considers the alternatives, which may include purchasing new equipment, repairing the existing machinery, or switching to the manual process, to name a few. Finally, in the end, the administrator evaluates whether the changes could indeed reduce the number of defective products to an acceptable level.
Last but not least, the decisions should include a minimum of two alternatives considering that one of the options is not changing anything. Usually, adopting the latter strategy leads to the worst outcome, but it may sometimes be the opposite. In order to understand which choice is better, managers should assess each alternative by their possible outcome. For instance, Marc Zuckerberg refused to sell Facebook to Yahoo for $1 billion as he assessed that the company would cost more in the future (Hoefflinger, 2017). Although choosing the best option may seem easy theoretically, in practice, decision-making is a complicated process due to existing uncertainties.
Decision-making is at the heart of a supervisory job, and without such function, this position would cease to exist. Indeed, the main responsibility of any manager and supervisory manager, in particular, is making choices that would facilitate the productivity of the whole department. In this regard, the line leaders should answer the questions “who?”, “what?”, “when?”, “where?” and “how?” regarding the operations on a daily basis. Moreover, supervisors also deliver more decisions than senior managers and usually operate with a narrower time frame as they are directly responsible for the production. For those reasons, if managers can metaphorically represent a person’s head without which the body (organization) would be incapable of operating, supervisors definitely serve as the company’s heart.
Reference
Hoefflinger, M. (2017).Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s controversial decision to turn down Yahoo’s $1 billion early offer to buy Facebook. Insider.