First Level Leadership Blog

Which is the most important skill required by a leader?

I think Problem Solving and Decision Making relate to every thing you do as a leader. You will always be judged as to how effective a leader you are by your ability to solve problems and make decisions.

Why do Problem Solving and Decision Making Skills overlap?

It is strange but true, problem solving and decision making skills are pretty closely related. Their actions and their processes frequently overlap.

Let us take an example – If your customer satisfaction is dropping, what will you do?

It is a problem right! Solving a problem initially involves finding out possible solutions…  You would immediately start thinking of all the solutions that could fix the problem.

This could be:

- Hiring new customer service professional or

- You might think to increase the frequency of training.

Now the moment you start looking at the solutions, you start looking into your decision making techniques

You start thinking, which alternatives to accept and implement. So decision making and problem solving are quite closely related and they can often overlap.

Therefore, I am going to give you a set of five questions to follow

This might help you in your process of decision making. You will have to come up with a structure to your problem solving process to explore and analyze the problems, so that you can look at the solutions.  However, you can best do this by exploring and understanding some of the major issues involved in making decisions by asking the following five questions:

1. What are the time constraints?
2. Who will participate in the decision making process
3. Will this be recurring or one time decision?
4. What are the components of this decision?
5. What techniques will be used to make this decision?

Remember – Leaders get paid to solve problems correctly and make the right decisions.

There are several techniques available to help you structure your decisions. In part two of the post, I am going to list some decision making techniques…

Tags: Decision Making, Leaders Dilemma, Problem Solving

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 22nd, 2010 at 4:57 am and is filed under Decision Making. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.