Collaborative Decision Making
Organizational leaders are required to make decisions every
day. Some are so routine that they are
automatic. Some are not as simple. A leader’s decisions almost always affects the
people they lead. Many times the leader
gets a sense of urgency that a decision must be made right away which is
generally not the case. Important
decisions take time to get them right. But
time and time again, the leader makes the decision in a vacuum and without
input. As one might expect, many of
those decisions are scrutinized, some are argued, and some are simply rejected. Why is that?
Well, there are several possible reasons. A decision was made that directly affected
the entire organization without notice.
The decision was not well thought out and it has negative effects on a
number of employees. A decision was made
that did not consider all the facts and simply cannot be implemented. In each of these cases, a collaborative team
could have prevented a negative outcome (Levine, 2009). I will not argue that assembling teams for
every decision that has to be made during the course of a week is
necessary. I do not believe it is. There are those that come up fairly often
that would benefit from the collaborative approach. Occasionally however, a situation surfaces
that demands input and collaboration.
They usually hit your desk late on Friday afternoon with the letters,
bold and red, stamped for all to take notice: ASAP. Your instinct will be to drop what you’re
doing and take care of it so you do not have to worry about it over the
weekend. My advice is do not do it. Read it, understand it, begin to put together
a mental action plan, but do not do it.
Lay it neatly on your desk and make it your first order of business
Monday morning. That is exactly what I
should have done.
It was September 2001, a week or two after the towers fell so
everything was important and every task was due immediately. Our wing was flying 24-hour coverage seven
days a week out of three different locations.
At home coverage was the entire continental United States and additional
Presidential escort/support missions. I
will spare you the math, but doing that requires quite a few aircraft
continuously rotating orbits and masses of personnel to make sure there were
aircraft ready to go at all times. Our
two deployed locations of course had aircraft tied up that could not return to
help. The result of that was numbers and
statistics being posted daily that was once believed impossible; the numbers
were staggering. But I digress. That is a story for another day. What all of this meant was everyone that
worked on our base was on duty for twelve hours, went home for twelve, and then
returned to duty. The traffic was a
nightmare. Getting on or off base was
nearly impossible and it created traffic problems which posed a serious threat
to personnel. Twice a day, anyone with bad
intentions had open access to half the workers.
We were sitting ducks if you will.
This brings me back to my task. I
did receive it late in the day on a Friday afternoon. The task was to implement staggered arrivals
and departures to reduce the volume of traffic at the gates. But, it had to be transparent to mission
accomplishment. It seemed
straightforward and simple enough, so I sat down, gave it a little thought, and
completed it in less than minutes. I
split each shift in half would come in at 0600 hours and the other half of the
shift would come in at 0800. The relief
was similarly staggered half of the shift in at 1600 the other half at 1800
hours without sacrificing mission. I was
pleased that it was done and I did not worry about it all weekend. But, I probably should have.
Monday morning at roll call I briefed the new staggered
arrival departure times, but instead of the smiles I expected got confused/angry
looks. I asked the section chiefs to
remain with me for a short meeting and dismissed the rest of the section. The section chiefs told me that they had
heard that this change was about to happen and the people wanted to have an
input. They did not want it to be
staggered as it was. It affected a large
number of people, in fact the only person it did not affect was me. The section chiefs assured me there was a
better way to meet the task. I
recognized my action as a mistake. I got
an extension on the task and told the section chiefs to go get the information
they need, put together two skeleton plans, and meet back here at 4 p.m.
At 4 p.m. we were sitting at the table. My plan affected childcare for thirteen
people, school for eleven, and part time jobs for another eight. The rest were just pissed because they were
not allowed to volunteer many were already switching times. How arrogant that I would make a decision
that affected so many but did not affect me.
If I had waited and brought the stakeholders (section chief)s I would
have had the information I needed, access personnel expertise, to expertise on
daily operations, how to best separate shifts and remain operational, having
stakeholders would keep me from
destroying morale, and I would have succeeded the first time through (Hoch, et
al.,2001). The section chiefs came, as
promised, with two well thought plans. I
selected the plan that affected the least amount of people and caused the least
amount of damage. It also put my flight
back on 8-hour shifts again…a far superior plan.
Beyond the section chiefs, I do not believe anyone else could
have helped me that day. I learned that
I needed to not make the decision in a rush on the way out the door. It was rushed at best and irresponsible at
worst. Making a rash decision that will
not affect me is careless and should never be repeated unless absolutely
necessary. Finally I learned that
expertise is readily available in the form of stakeholders and I will not skip
over them again
References:
Hoch, S. J.,
Kunreuther, H. C., & Gunther, R. E. (2001). Wharton on Making Bad Decisions. Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons Inc.
Levine, S.
(2009). Gettin to Resolution: Turning conflict into collaboration (2nd
Edition). Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
No comments:
Post a Comment