Tuned to decisions…

In many public and private organizations, the idea of monitoring decisions is hardly present. Once a decision is made, good or bad , that becomes an end item. Does it help a growing institution any way? Before going into that, it is better to understand first the antecedents that normally endorse a good manager as a rational decision-maker.
First of all the conditions that lead a manager to make decisions are the presence of problems. How problems evolve in a company or an organization vary in their nature and domain. Some could be related to human while others could be connected with non-human factors. If a personnel manager is suspected by the employees of an organization in his recruitment practice for accepting generally new comers on the basis of promises they make to advance him their first-month salary, or if the case involves female-comers on their beauty ranking rather than merit, such behavior creates a big problem for the head of an organization as it has no tangible information source. Besides, if a transport officer is suspected likewise of using the organization’s vehicles for his personal affairs outside the normal working hours by breaking the rules and culture of the company, it will pose again a similar problem for the CEO of that company. If again the attrition rate of a company is very fast, that will also give another problem to the big boss.
These problems become apparent headache since they may not be based on verifiable information. If anything, the suspected culprit is not captured red-handed to afford the CEO ripe opportunity for making choice for rational decision.
In decision-making theory, it is often said that no approach to decision-making can guarantee that a manager will always make the right decision. But, it is often true, particularly, in making non-programmed decisions, managers who use ration, intelligent, and systematic approach are more likely than other managers to come up with high quality solutions.
For a manager to be a rational decision-maker, one should investigate the situation, and then develop alternative solutions. At the third stage, he has to evaluate the alternatives before him and select the best one available.
When a problem occurs, experienced managers give particular emphasis on investigating the situation. If one takes the above-mentioned cases, the personnel manager, who tends to admit new comers on the basis of their financial rewards in general, and if they are female-comers on the basis of their attractiveness to him, how could the head of the organization establish the reliability of the information which is only based on rumors? The fact of the matter is that he is driven to a tight corner; and how about the attrition rate or that of the abuse of authority of the transport officer?
It is at this initial stage of the process that the Head of the Organization tests his wisdom and that of his closed associates. Will they be able to define the problems which are simply based on rumors? Are these problems symptoms of other more fundamental and pervasive difficulties? Of course, if the upsurge in employee resignations is not interfering with the achievement of organizational objective, it can be tolerated, particularly, if the turnover involves relatively low performers, since more qualified ones could be readily found for replacement. But, the other problems are pains in the neck.
After defining the problems, the CEO should diagnose the causes of the problems, as a medical doctor diagnoses the causes of a certain pain in a patient before he decides on the type of treatment. But, this is a difficult task to undertake, as diagnostic questions involve in some ways human relationships. It is only after these two steps are exhausted that the chief of the organization identifies the decision objectives. Then he comes to a reasonable conclusion that would constitute an effective solution. Identifying the decision objectives is as hard as defining the problem, because just, one only solution may not lead to organizational achievement. Most problems may consist of several elements and a CEO is unlikely to find one solution that will work for all of them.
Hence, the importance of the investigation level of the problem leads to the development of alternatives and then to their evaluation and selection. But, what is important most in the rational model of decision-making are the implementation and the monitoring stages of the selected alternatives. It is these parts of the hall game particularly that of the monitoring part that most organizations miss knowingly or unknowingly. Since both directions are anti result-oriented tasks of an organization, all attempts should be made to redress this inherent weakness in most organizations. If this is met correctly success is sure to come.