Making Decisions in Tough Times

From time to time leadership teams are faced with a major strategic decision  to reduce and redirect dollars and human resources to meet a major downturn in the marketplace.  Let's take the scenario where they don't want to let staff go, nor do they want to shift their services away from what they know what works and what made them successful. Revenue is dwindling fast and if they don’t do something soon they know they will be attending one of those dreaded meetings with their banker.  

If you are in this position it is time to take a surgeon’s look at all your  policies, processes and procedures. Engage your key management personnel in finding ways to do more with less. Your task is to map out everything and measure it against your overall strategic direction. In today’s parlance this would be akin to LEAN, - when we did this we called it "Finding Efficiency."  Your overall strategy is to find the savings to weather the storm without terminating employees.  One way to accomplish this is to follow a rigorous decision-making process with the following steps: 

1. Decision clarification – For each process or policy under review make sure you clearly understand the key decisions you need to make and their impact on your management team, employees and services. 
2. Decision Importance – Measure the importance of those decision against the question:  “What will happen if we don’t make this decision?” 
3. Impact on strategy – Clarify whether the decision will take you away from your overall strategic direction and the services that made you successful. 
4. Information identification and collection – Pull out all the stops and fully clarify and search out all the information that impact the process or policy and hence the decisions you need to make. 
5. Alternatives generation – Ask these fundamental questions: “Are there more cost effective ways to accomplish this policy, process or procedure? Can we reduce, reconfigure or realign the steps we make to carry out the policies,  processes or procedures? 
6. Resource requirements – Measure each alternative against the question: “Does this process, activity, policy add more resource requirements or less?” If it adds more put a minus sign beside it, if it is less  put a plus sign beside it. If it adds less ask: "How can we make better use of these resources?" For each alternative tally up all the pluses and minuses. When all the plus and minus signs are tallied you will have a pretty good feel for how to use the resources more effectively and efficiently. 
7. Alternative prioritization – Prioritizing alternative positions is often difficult but two factors make it easier : 1) be clear about what you want to accomplish in the end; and,  2) make sure you set out several criteria at the beginning to guide you in the decision-making process such as, more efficient policy, processes and procedures, do more with less, keep staff in tact, keep what works and discard what doesn't. 
8. Make a Decision – Take the most cost effective alternative that adheres to your criteria and make a decision and move on 

When I take companies and individuals through these steps the decision-making process sparks a lot of debate and dialogue but it points them in the right direction and they come to conclusions that all can rally around.  
 
Finally, make sure that the decisions you make accomplish the results you intended. So evaluate the results on a quarterly basis and “tweak” the decision to meet new conditions as they arise. Here is what I found when companies did this: the economic storm was weathered and  the company moved ahead with an improved bottom line which allowed them to keep their valuable people and improve services to their customers in the long term. 
  
From the archives, Fontanie Learning Solutions

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