My CEO Life

McCain & Palin

I thought i would follow up my entry the other day (The Art of Decision Making) with some more thoughts on the topic.  In particular I was listening to a podcast about John McCain and his selection of Sarah Palin for his Vice President running mate.  In McCain’s case, Sarah Palin was a selection that almost no one saw coming.  She has little experience and evidently the decision made by McCain was based on minimal research and appears driven by political requirements.

So what does someone’s decision making processes tell you about the person and your confidence in the person to do their job?

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I have received the following question from Alain in Europe.

As a manager (thus as well as a CEO), the biggest part of your day is consumed by taking decisions. We can take decisions in different ways:

• by stupidity / lack of knowledge (very bad)
• by influence from others (bad)
• team decision (respect of others’ views)
• by “just the facts, facts, facts!”
• by gut feeling

The question is : how do you balance “facts, facts, facts!” and “gut feeling”, because obviously, they often are opposite to each other. When do you know when you have to just look at the facts, and when you should trust your feelings even if the facts tell a different story? I reckon that experience plays a big role, because your gut feeling builds upon past good and bad experience. Sometimes, though, you’re up to an all new situation and you can’t really look back at anything similar in your past, but again, your belly somehow tells you what to do…

Decision making (along with communication) is probably the most important skill a CEO can have. First and foremost, a CEO needs to be seen as decisive. If they are not, they will be seen as being weak and the employees will be unlikely to support the CEO when the going gets tough.

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