What’s the best decision-making model you can follow in business management?
While there are many decision-making processes you can follow in business management; the ethical decision-making process is the best to follow.
When it comes to making decisions in business, it’s essential to have a proper plan in place to ensure that any decision you make is sound, well thought out, and will thoroughly address the problem. For effective decision-making, there are a few decision-making processes you can follow to guarantee that you always make the right decision. Let’s look at the best model of the decision-making process in business management you can follow.
Ethical Decision-Making Model
Many companies seem to put ethics on the backburner when it comes to making decisions which have led a lot of companies to flood recent news feeds because of their unethical practices. The ethical decision-making model, in my opinion, is the most important decision-making process in management you can follow.
Ensuring that any business decision you make is ethical is not only the right thing to do but it helps you avoid any PR crisis and shows your audience that you don’t just care about making money at any cost. The next time you have a major business decision to make, follow these six steps of the ethical decision-making process:
1. Define the Problem
Defining a business problem takes time and it is essential that the leaders of your company take time to truly understand a problem and where they need to bring in ethical principles. The leaders of your company need to decide why an ethical decision needs to be made and any outcomes they desire for their decision.
2. Consult Resources
After the leaders of your company have defined the problem and truly understood it, they now need to work on developing a thorough strategy using resources and people in the company. This can include co-workers with excellent ideas on how to address and handle the problem, members of the HR team, or even just policies and handbooks the company set a long time ago. It is essential that leaders of your company gain clarity from other sources when creating a proper strategy.
3. Lasting Effects
When creating a proper strategy to address the problem at hand, it is imperative to think about the lasting effects your decision will bring and how it will affect others. There is nothing worse than making a bad decision during an ongoing PR crisis.
4. Consider What Other Companies Have Done
If you’re unsure of where to begin when it comes to implementing your strategy to address a problem, consider what other companies have done when faced with a similar problem. It can also be beneficial to look at mistakes other companies have made when it comes to handing decision-making in management, so you can avoid making the same mistakes.
5. Make Your Decision
After you’ve truly understood the problem, consulted with others around you, thought long and hard about any lasting effects your decision could bring and avoided mistakes other companies have made in their decision-making process, now’s the time to make your decision. Your choice will impact many people so it’s a good idea to create a proposal of what the issue is and how leaders in your company plan to work to solve it.
6. Implement & Evaluate
After you’ve gone through a thorough decision-making process and come up with the best solution, now’s the time to implement your decision and evaluate the results. It’s impossible for anyone to benefit from a plan that’s not put into action but that’s not enough. You also can evaluate how well the plan works. After you’ve implemented your decision ask yourself: Is the problem finally fixed? Did the decision make things better or worse? Were there some unintended consequences you didn’t foresee?
When you analyze how well your decision is working you can then verify if it was the appropriate response or if you need to start over.
