For smarter decisions, empower your employees
Fully empowered employees make good decisions and resolve problems. We explore how various leadership and management styles can best support them.
Meet Jackie, a business-unit leader who spends the majority of the workday making the operational decisions, large and small, that land on her desk. These keep her busy but leave little time for important strategic decisions, such as what product lines to prioritize, which acquisitions to pursue, or how to expand the business and meet its targets. So Jackie decides to make a change and tells her team to expect more delegation and more responsibility.
Within days, however, problems arise. Many decisions that Jackie had delegated boomerang back to her, either directly or by team members asking questions like “What would you do in my shoes?” Decision-making committees suddenly materialize, requiring even more of Jackie’s time and input. Some decisions that do get made aren’t good for the business. Others take longer than usual because so many people become involved. Jackie is as busy as ever and also misses a number of her own targets. How did things go so wrong?
As business becomes ever more complex and dynamic, managers and leaders like Jackie have to make more decisions, under time pressure, and often with too little or the wrong kind of data. We found that decision making takes up a huge proportion of management’s time—as much as 70 percent of it for some C-suite executives. The opportunity costs are staggering: for the average Fortune 500 company, they typically equal more than half a million days of managers’ time, or $250 million a year in salaries.1 What’s especially troubling is the fact that, despite this massive investment, a majority of respondents to a McKinsey Global Survey said that their organizations do not spend that decision-making time well.
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Πηγή: mckinsey
