High-Impact Decision Making - Leadership Program - Mentora Institute
Performance

High-Impact Decision Making

Unlock the collective wisdom of your team by creating an environment where ideas are freely shared, conflicting viewpoints are comfortably debated, new learnings are constantly generated, and people feel safe to ideate, explore, and challenge each other.

The Case for High-Impact Decisions as Competitive Differentiator

When organizations adopt the right decision making practices, they:

  • Increase their number of good business decisions by 6 times.
  • Cut their failure rates by half.

Research shows that organizations with high decision making speed and quality generate:

  • 2.5 times higher growth
  • 2 times higher profit
  • 30 percent higher returns on invested capital

These organizations also experience greater transparency, accuracy, stability, and speed.

Sources: McKinsey, Harvard Business Review

A 2021 survey found that 65 percent of decisions made in organizations today are more complex — involving more stakeholders and choices — than they were two years ago.

And yet:

  • 80 percent of people do not feel their organizations excel at decision making.
  • More than 50 percent of managers say their decisions are not timely.
  • 57 percent of C-suite executives feel that their decision making time is not used effectively.
  • A mere 2 percent of managers/executives regularly apply best practices when making decisions.

Further, managers at a typical Fortune 500 company may waste more than half a million days a year on ineffective decision making.

Sources: Source: McKinsey, Gartner, Harvard Business Review

Behaviors Learned

  • An eye vector icon. Move team members away from personal agendas to the pursuit of truth
  • open book vector icon. Create an environment of psychological safety
  • An arrow-up vector icon in a circle frame. Foster open, objective dialogs across the team
  • A key vector icon Engage in discovery, learning, and growth
  • A bullseye with a missing part vector icon. Challenge each-others’ thinking in a safe and constructive manner
  • A sun vector icon. Practice intellectual humility

Core Ideas

When we’re dealing with high-stakes issues, it is critical that we uncover all risks and opportunities, and all possible solutions and constraints, in the situation. No one individual on a team typically has a perfect understanding of the issues, or a monopoly over the truth. To make the best decision, team members need to share all relevant ideas, facts, and perspectives and then investigate and resolve them objectively.

Mentora’s program on High-Impact Decision Making is founded on five principles:

Align

Get team members to rise above their individual agendas to align on a common objective.

Dialog

Allow all relevant ideas, facts, and perspectives to be thoughtfully shared, debated, and resolved as a team.

Enquire

Shift team members from a knower to a learner mindset so that they go beyond advocating their position to enquiring and understanding situations better before finalizing their point of view.

Learn

Focus not just on maximizing performance on projects but also on maximizing learning from every experience. A project is not simply successful or unsuccessful — every attempt can yield valuable insights, partial breakthroughs, and fresh ideas.

Engage

Get the quieter voices on the team to speak up and have constructive ways to challenge and, where needed, contradict and overturn others’ thinking.

Global Telecom Company Case Study

Improving Decision Making

Context

Our client, a global telecom company that has requested to remain anonymous, had been facing dramatic changes in their external and internal environment. They wanted leaders at multiple layers of the organization to learn how to make high-impact decisions in challenging conditions. This required a shift from a culture of risk-aversion to disciplined risk-taking, in order to not miss out on valuable contracts and beneficial business outcomes. Our challenge was to create a training program which would work at multiple levels of the organizational structure, across functions and global teams.

Program

The client asked Mentora to design a curriculum with the following outcomes in mind:

  • Get people to openly share ideas and dissenting opinions.
  • Provide a framework for analyzing failures.
  • Help teams engage in constructive conflict.
  • Move people from advocacy to collaboration.

Delivery

Drawing on our work and research into High-Impact Decision Making in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) world, we set company leaders on a transformational learning journey that included:

  • A live webinar
  • A self-paced digital learning experience on Mentora Digital
  • Self-reflection questions
  • Virtual role-plays which incorporated peer-to-peer feedback on responses
  • Three interactive case studies on High-Impact Decision Making

Impact

94 percent of the participants said that the program met or exceeded their expectations.

Participant Voices

“I consider myself to be an individual with fair and strong values, coupled with good competence. But there have been situations where people have pushed back on things or resisted change. I now feel that I won’t feel helpless in such situations in the future.”

Executive | A Global Telecom Company

“This program will help to ensure that we have a better understanding of the situation when making product decisions — get it right and select the optimum go-to market strategies.”

Executive | A Global Telecom Company

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