In the article below is a story or two of a boss making some poor decisions. Admittedly, they are not life or death decisions but nevertheless they are poor decisions. Not just one poor decision.
We work with a lot of extreme adventurers where even one wrong decision could be fatal. It is by working with them that we both help them but also take the findings from their world and apply it to the corporate decision-making world.
When we are running decision-making and behaviour assessments, we will nearly always see a team make on average a 50% better decision than the most experienced person on that team.
Being boss does not mean you are always right and being boss does not mean you have to make all the decisions on your own.
A few months ago, I posted about a friend of mine regaling me with a story about her boss’s truly awful decision-making process. (In the interest of full disclosure, details regarding my friend and her firm have been obscured to protect the identity of my friend and hide her from repercussions.) The first time around, the boss decided, all by his lonesome, with no technical expertise or user experience of his own, to purchase a new CRM package. He did this on a personal referral from someone, but no one at my friend’s firm has a clue as to the identity of the someone. In other words, the boss entrusted his company’s most valuable asset — it’s customer information — to a system he knew nothing about.
