Is Your Team’s Decision Making Process First-Rate?

To build a high-performing team you’ll need a first-rate decision making process. 

Consider a major capital project where thousands of decisions are required to execute it successfully. These decisions impact project safety, schedule, cost, quality, productivity and team morale. 

Decision Effectiveness is the degree to which a decision, once implemented, achieves the targeted outcome. Decision Effectiveness is a function of decision Quality, Speed, Communication and Commitment.  

DE = f(Q + S + C + C) 

With so many people - individuals, stakeholders and functional groups - all needing decisions to keep a project moving forward, one might assume that the decision making process on most capital projects is highly effective. If you made that assumption you would be wrong. The reality is that most decision making processes are dysfunctional. 

Let’s look a little closer at the speed of decisions. Consider this typical scenario. Team members await a decision for weeks. They assume someone or some group is working on making the decision they need. But then, only after the long waiting, do they discover that no one was working on the needed decision. Now the lack of a decision has caused conflict, frustration, irritation and a delay in the project. And it has eroded trust.  

This is usually a breakdown in decision rights. Decision rights identify the person or group having the accountability for making certain decisions. Often:

• Decision rights are not defined / only loosely defined: Every project is different and thus decision rights must be defined for each specific project. Expecting team members to figure it out by looking at an org chart or by trial and error is irresponsible and slows down project progress.
• Decision rights are changing frequently: Capital projects experience many natural organizational changes, such as one stakeholder finishing up its part of the project and another stakeholder starting its part of the project. This keeps decision rights in a state of flux. Just when the team has it figured out, it changes. Why let your project get slowed down when it only takes a few minutes to review decision rights and make needed updates.
• Decision rights are elevated too high in the organization: Decision rights, along with spending authority, are often elevated too high in the organization. This greatly slows the decision making process. Outstanding leaders know that most decisions are best made by the qualified person(s) closest to the situation; not necessarily those holding the highest positions. If decision rights on your project are elevated high in the organization, it is likely your project (or company) has a low trust culture.

Are any of these common problems with decision rights impacting your team?