---

Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “Nothing is more difficult and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.” He recognized that a few critical decisions put leaders to the test. In turbulent times, some leaders make tough choices with courage and conviction. Others cannot cope with the complexity and uncertainty. They remain indecisive and their rivals gain the upper hand.

Like Napoleon, today’s business managers must cope with a great deal of ambiguity as they make important choices about the future. They face uncertainty with regard to politics, macroeconomic growth and stability, technology and changing consumer tastes. Many worry that an unknown event will transform their entire industry in a matter of a few weeks or months.

Most executives find ways to cope with this uncertainty. They adopt strategies for simplifying complex situations so that they can make decisions quickly and effectively. These strategies enable managers to make sense of a confusing situation.

Chuck Martin
In the next seven weeks, I plan to describe seven strategies that business managers can employ to cope with ambiguity and complexity as they make critical decisions. These seven ways were recommended by Chuck Martin, New York Times business bestselling author. Martin has tapped into his research firm’s extensive network of business connections to discover that the vast majority of executives and managers are experiencing record levels of work stress during turbulent times.

On the bright side, Martin also has discovered that tough times have brought out the best in the world’s most successful business leaders. When creating these seven strategies, he has distilled his findings into a tough new bottom-line approach for moving out of crisis to resilience.
These strategies often prove very effective because they enable managers to make accurate judgments under stressful conditions. Unfortunately, each of these strategies has serious drawbacks as well. When employing these techniques, many managers draw the wrong conclusions, make biased estimates, pursue flawed policies, or impede the development of commitment within their management teams. Thus, managers must use these strategies with great care.



Seven strategies
You don’t need to be told that the world of work is tougher than ever--you live it every day. Faced with shrinking budgets, smaller staffs, shorter deadlines, more demanding customers and an unrelenting call for innovation and growth, is it any wonder that so many executives and managers surveyed say they feel “highly stressed”? Clearly, the old management paradigms just don’t cut it anymore. What’s needed is a fresh, bottom-line approach designed for what really works in today’s business world. And that’s what you get in Martin’s ‘The seven ways to make tough decisions easier’.
With candid commentaries from top business leaders, Martin reveals how many high profile companies follow these principles to meet the increasing demands to do more, deliver more and increase more--while keeping stress low and morale high. More important, he shows you how to put them to work in your organisation, right away. You’ll learn proven techniques for:

• You should value collaboration and encourage—even ‘force’—it among their colleagues.
• You should be flexible and never become so rigidly tied to one path. Tough managers do not fear innovation and are always receptive to input from others.
• You should be willing to make hard decisions and stick to them, even when people you may care about are on the other side of the aisle.
• You should use clear communication to align those who execute strategies with those who create them. No double-speak no fibs!
• You should prioritize results, identify actions needed to achieve them and build consensus on what it will take to get the job done.
• You should be a good team player who always keeps the interests and vision of the company in mind.
• You should keep morale high within your team by rewarding good work and giving people everything they need to do their best.

The choice is yours: Continue to do things the old-fashioned way and risk job (and career) burnout or adopt a bold new approach to managing designed for the realities of the 21st century workplace. If the second option sounds good to you, then read the next seven articles when we delve deep into each strategy each week.

Tough decisions
If you are the manager, well then, as they say, ‘the buck stops at your desk’. For managers, there is nowhere to run when it’s time to make the hardest of decisions. And they need look no further for the biggest challenges they will face than with the personnel they have in their teams.
Any of these tough business decisions sound familiar?

• Deciding between taking on a new customer and having to borrow money in order to fund inventory for production.
• Deciding between personally borrowing money to fund a great business idea or giving over control to a group of investors.
• Deciding to fire employees or instead to fund losses during a weak revenue period.
• Deciding between retaining and firing your best sales persons even though they are detrimental to the company’s morale.
• Deciding how to allocate resources in a company between marketing, sales, production and customer support.
• Deciding to hire the person with experience or the one with the best attitude that fits the company culture.

While there is no way to learn to make ‘the right decision’ every time, managers can learn the process of making the ‘best possible decision at that right time.’

Most often when decisions need to be made, as long as facts are clearly taken into account, although there might be some difficulty in telling those who might be disappointed, the right decision is pretty clear. Being ‘factual’ makes it much easier, because objective assessments are much easier to make than subjective ones. When we let emotions rule our decision-making process, that’s when things start to unravel.
Faced with a choice between two great contributors, is often where a manager needs to tread most carefully. Whilst it might seem to be a lot more difficult then, looking hard and being absolutely objective – not to mention keeping the required outcome very, very close to mind – can make it an easier task.

Five rules
Here, a manager does have to watch for the influence of personal preference, favouritism and emotional attachment whilst deciding because these can often blur objectivity. Making the best decision – often when it seems that there might be a loser in the process – sometimes has to be done.

• Make the decision after careful consideration, but then do not waver. Commit to one path and take action. Wavering will almost guarantee that the desired outcome is not accomplished.
• Accept that this is not an easy decision and there are no ‘right’ answers. Stop searching. There is only a ‘current’ right decision based on the information that is available.
• Make no decision before it’s the ‘right time’. This is the key for any executive. If you don’t make those decisions that you don’t have to make, invariably, there’s new information that comes, there’s more information, better information, better data.  Determine whether you need to take the decision now, or in the afternoon, or tomorrow or next week. Making a decision at a later date may lead to a more informed one.
• Deciding with heart or head?  You have to admit if you are making decisions based on emotion or the facts. While it is not necessarily bad to make a decision on emotion, this needs to be clear.
• When definitive action is taken, learn from the result and then plan the next move. Remember, business success is a series of patient interim steps, not giant wild leaps.

It can be tough to get it right for the bigger picture – and that’s where great managers earn their crust.

(The writer, a corporate director with over 25 years’ senior managerial experience can be contacted at [email protected])