Decision making bottlenecks
Every organisations across almost every industry is currently wrestling with considerable challenges.
With the ongoing impact of Covid-19, businesses are facing an uncertain future. Many of the iconic brands that have made up the UK high street for most of our lives may no longer be there. The hospitality industry is reeling from the impact of almost 3 months of a year where they have taken no revenue at all. On the Oil and Gas Industry is facing a year that Fatih Birol has said “will go down as the worst year in oil history.”
Dealing with the volume of existing turmoil and future uncertainty is a complex issue that is rightly consuming the time and focus of leaders across all industries, however, organisations have to be careful that their focus on tomorrow does not lead to such a stall in momentum that their businesses end up failing today.
For businesses to continue effective delivery of “day to day" activities whilst simultaneously dealing with extraordinary circumstances, decision making within the organisations can’t carry on as normal. Organisations should not have sufficient spare capacity within their resources for circumstances like this to be absorbed without any change in decision ownership. On any given day it could strongly be argued that leaders within organisations already have an abundance of important tasks and a scarcity of time to carry them out. This means that even in the course of normal business, organisations would benefit from pushing decision making authority deeper into the hierarchy. The current environment only exacerbates the burden on leaders and and will impact a great many activities, however, many that are bing impacted could actually carry on with minimal disruption provided organisations recognise and mitigate the dangers of decision-making bottlenecks. To do this leaders should look to delineate between the routine and the critical abnormal activity they are engaged with. They then need to identify the activities it is essential that they personally own and then delegate as much of the other decision making as possible to and empower their teams to work more autonomously.
Whilst the delegation of a leader’s authority is not unusual, what is required at the moment is different to how it is typically carried out.
Normally, if a role is delegated to a more junior leader, that delegate will have the leader’s full decision making authority…to a point. That point is usually until a genuinely major decision has to be taken, at which point the major decision is delayed until the senior leader returns and is able to make it. The duration and impact of the current challenges facing organisations are likely to mean that this way of delegating decision making will have to change if businesses are to continue to move forward effectively. Leaders will need to delegate significant strategic decisions to their subordinates. These may have long reaching impacts on the business as a whole and yet are essential if businesses are to continue operating. In addition, once decisions have been made by the delegate, senior leaders will be faced with the challenge of having to continue to support the decisions made on their behalf and not reverse them when the delegation of authority is removed. To reverse the decisions in effect renders the delegation pointless and negates any positive impact it had on maintaining business continuity.
Organisations that adopt decentralised decision making will ensure that their business continues to deliver through uncertain times and will emerge from the challenges with the least possible disruption. Those that don’t will suffer the impact of lost momentum for years to come.