Business Strategy: Are you listening to your gut?

Are you a manager who honors
your intuition or data?

Decision making isn’t easy – even for the best of us! Yet, the average manager makes endless decisions each day, many of them, without going through a process of analysis. How do they do this? Well, it’s my experience that decision-makers tend to fall into three categories and, generally speaking, each has a slightly different approach. Remember, we over-simplify here for educational purposes 🙂

Typical Tenured Managers: Tend to review information (data), meld that with past history, and add any new knowledge which could impact the outcome.

Typical Mid-Managers: Tend to review the necessary data and utilize this as the primary reason for a decision. Some who have a very strong intuition, or hold an expertise in the particular topic, may have this influence their decision more so, but it is not the primary reason for their decision-making.

Typical New Managers: This group tends to be the most inconsistent in their decision-making, which makes them the most dangerous of all decision-makers! Why? They don’t have a proven process for effective decision-making yet. Yes, they may get lucky in guessing correctly, but don’t have a systematic approach which is repeatable to assure success. Imagine, you are new manager and you are “guesstimating” accurately. It would be very easy to fall under the illusion that you “know” what you are doing. Unfortunately, this could lead to catastrophic outcomes if the business allows this type of lucky manager to make decisions of greater magnitude! Let’s understand that this isn’t the new manager’s fault – typically they haven’t been properly mentored in this process.

Now, just like everything in nature, balance is the key to success! A new manager should be properly mentored in the process of decision-making utilizing an analytical tool based upon all the relevant data. Once this is learned, a senior or tenured manager should also add another element to the decision-making process- intuition.

Yes, I did say intuition should be honored to keep decision-making balanced. Around my home and business we nicknamed this “my spidey-senses say…” 🙂 Your intuition is very natural and has gifted our species survival instincts since the beginning of time. Would it make sense to disregard this internal wisdom you may have? OK, with this statement I admit that some people really are “dialed-in” and are quite accurate with honoring their intuition, whereas others may be learning this.

In the spectrum of properly balanced decision-making do your find you are more successful/accurate when you utilize your data solely, intuition solely, or a combination of the two? If you need some assistance in building your decision-making analysis tool, reach out to me. It’s not a long process and it will repeatedly serve you quite well over time!

If you or your business needs rescuing on this particular topic
or any other Business Strategies we have been discussing,
please reach out to Maggie (262) 716.7750   FYI: I’m in the Central Time Zone

Blessings of Success to YOU ~
The Business Rescue Coach, Maggie Mongan
Brilliant Breakthroughs, Inc.