Effective Decision Making Guide For Leaders

Owning and running a business is the most fulfilling feeling one can experience, bettering people's lives while also creating jobs. This position does not come without its share of responsibility, enough of which can make decision-making and advancing the vision difficult. The toll this takes on business owners will wear them out over time if they take on the responsibility alone. As well, It’s hard to make decisions as a leader without frustrating others in the organization. For these reasons, it is extremely useful for leaders to have a support system that will guide them and the organization to success. 

Constructing a support crew to assist your ability to lead the team effectively involves surrounding yourself with the right people. You don’t want these people to be ones that just simply agree with what you say and don’t provide a lot of feedback. You want individuals with edge, experience, people who are going to challenge you to think differently.

A common mistake of leaders is not being open to feedback, as a result, they involve people who would be classified as a “yes man”. Openness to feedback is the only way anyone can improve at anything, unfortunately, many associate critiques with negativity. The position of a CEO, President, VP, etc, requires decision-making to be based on applying systems that can be trusted to benefit the organization. 

Analysis of what works and doesn’t work can only be identified by individuals directly working with the systems in place. For this reason, it is best for all business leaders to have an open-door model where those working for them can freely voice their opinions.

Now, the decision-making process should not be left solely up to the one person in charge, they need a crew to weigh options and outcomes. This is not to say that every decision made should be left up to the top of the chain, it is best to give responsibility down the chain when necessary. Different situations require situation fitting responses from leadership to assist.

With that being said, let's look at how leaders can involve others to assist with decision making:

Involve The Right People

Analyze the situation, identify the key stakeholders as well as those who will be involved in carrying out the task. With these individuals having heavy involvement in the situation, their opinions will come from having worked directly on the front line. It is not useful to make decisions without weighing the opinions or needs of the people being impacted by these decisions. They will tell you what resources they need and a timeline of when the task can be completed. 

Analyze The Input

Once everyone has expressed their feedback, leaders can weigh the risk, potential benefits, and logistics behind the requests. Leaders must take into account the level of resources available to them (budget, time, team size, etc). Remember to communicate when and if requests cannot be fulfilled, decisions should be made in the best interest of the organization.

Mitigate Risk

Identify the areas of risk, review them with those involved in the task and prepare them to be able to handle issues that may arise. This can be done by scenario-based training where individuals run through simulations of a problem arising and practice handling them. Using situations that are likely to occur whether it be an upset client or a resource failing, managing their quick response time will be beneficial. How they do in the simulation will help leaders to decide who to put in what position when executing the task.

Of course, it is impossible to anticipate everything that will or could go wrong, but preparation nonetheless will translate into readiness for other situations. 

Post Task Review

After the team has completed their task, hold a debriefing and highlight what went well and what needs improvement. This will be a useful tool for leaders the next time they go into a task to see how their decision-making benefited or limited the team. It will also help leaders evaluate which of their team members to delegate certain tasks to. Input from employees can only help so much, experience-based outcome analysis is the cherry on top for leaders' decision-making development. 

Conclusion

Making decisions is the main duty of leadership, these decisions of course are to guide the organization towards a collective vision. To be successful in doing so, leaders need the help of those working for and with them. This is to ensure that everyone in the organization is capable of doing their best work with all the necessary support.

We work with successful companies to increase their net profits using exceptional custom software solutions, contact us here to see how we can help your business grow!

Entrepreneur Guide to Problem-Solving: Failing Forward

Having the courage to start a business takes a lot of optimism, to begin with, having the courage to dedicate yourself to it is much different. When taking on the responsibility of starting a business, the pressure can be overwhelming. Wouldn’t it be great if you could start a business and generate profits the next day? Unfortunately, this is not the way it works, nor will it ever be, great businesses take time. They involve a lot of planning, setbacks, complete failures, and the continuous will to learn.

Deals will fall through, team members will give up, funding may not be received, the list goes on. You must believe in what you’re doing and have a reason for doing it that will prevent you from giving up. Oftentimes, when we make a mistake, we question ourselves with questions born out of doubt. The ability to answer those questions at the moment will come from your reasoning for success. No success story doesn’t involve failure, successful entrepreneurs only became successful after learning from mistakes.

The first key to overcoming business failure is to accept that it will happen. As a business leader, you must try everything you can to succeed, but not everything will be perfect. Once you have grounded yourself in the vision of the organization, build a team that will hold you accountable. A great team will be able to help you find solutions to problems, complete tasks more efficiently, and create cohesion in your development process. To prepare yourself to find these great people who will help you on your quest for success, here’s some advice:

Have A Vision

It is important to know what you’re after, what goals do you want to reach in 5 years with your business? Once you understand what you’re setting out to do, failure will become a useful tool to highlight where you need improvement to reach your goals. Failing can be hard and it’s normal to get frustrated at the moment. You must try to stop looking at failure as failure, look at it as an opportunity to get better. Implementing this will make you unstoppable and attract individuals to your vision that can help along the way.

Failure Isn’t Personal

Just because something didn’t work out, doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea or that you’re in over your head. Entering any market is a matter of careful research and lucky timing. You can analyze your audience as much as possible but, it is impossible to predict for certain if something is going to stick. Leaders must look at what went wrong and take measures to mitigate it for the next attempt.

Take Accountability

Failures cannot be blamed on individuals, if the team attempts something and it goes wrong, the whole team is at fault. As a leader, you must recognize yourself in the areas that went wrong and improve your approach to mitigate. This is another way to lead by example, if your team sees you reacting to a crisis with open-mindedness to do better next attempt, they will do the same.

Remember the easiest thing to do is point fingers at everyone but yourself. This will get you nowhere in the development process and only ensure the likelihood of failure again.

Post Failure Analysis

As we’ve covered, learning from failures and using them to do better is important. For the sake of an organization, after you’ve set out to complete a task, successful or unsuccessful, meet as a team. When you meet, highlight what went wrong and what went right, without applying blame. Make this a habit so that the team reflexively looks for ways to improve and also learn what they’re good at. The accountability with no blame tactic will also create further cohesion within the team and make development processes much smoother. 

Conclusion

Failure generates negative emotions, our natural inhibition will always tell us the bad things first. As an entrepreneur and a leader, the most important skill you can have is emotional intelligence. Of course, when something goes wrong, you will want to shout and tell everyone who contributed what a mess the situation is. No good will come from handling situations this way, instead, we must not lose sight of the vision.

Remember why this business is important to you, what kind of life it will allow you to live, and the people whose lives will benefit from it.

We work with successful companies to increase their net profits using exceptional custom software solutions, contact us here to see how we can help your business grow!

Digital Advertising in 2022: Eyes of The Audience

The new age of marketing is a big pond full of small fish. Companies are in a constant battle to market themselves on popular online platforms. As a result, consumers are bombarded with ads every day. To put this in perspective, the average American is exposed to anywhere between 4,000 to 10,000 ads daily.

Our brains are wired to ignore the ones that provoke no thought and pay attention to the ones that catch our interest. So the question is how can your brand be different? What do you offer that is sure to catch consumers' attention?

Every brand has a different approach to how they want their audience to perceive them, some have online personalities, some have themes for their social media posts, approaches vary. These methods give the brand uniqueness that separates them from the rest, it can do the same for your brand. 

The first thing to do is recognize the intent of ads, to generate leads, as marketers this is the basic concept in mind when producing anything. The audiences of today aren’t going to be persuaded by a billboard. If you’re not in their social media feed, reach is likely to be limited. Being strategic in the era of dominantly virtual advertising requires keeping up with virtual trends.

Using creative video ads is the dominant approach in 2022, for good reason considering the average North American spends nearly two hours a day watching videos. Video ads have been estimated to increase sales by up to 40%, as long as they’re short and engaging. The length of video ads is important to consider since the attention span of consumers is very narrow. With video ads becoming so useful to bring in new customers, let's look at what can set your videos apart from the rest:

Define Your Audience

It’s critical to take into account the target age, location, gender, or even profession of the audience members your product is made for. If you haven’t noticed yet, most people get different ads because of the posts they engage with. These are called targeted ads, while they may sound intrusive, they are a great way to generate leads (and no, they don’t listen to your conversations). Knowing exactly who you are marketing to will make the creative process much clearer in developing ads. 

Use A Strong Opening

As mentioned earlier, the attention span of consumers is not long, you’ll have to earn their attention within the first 3-5 seconds. The best ways to do this are to connect through what your product will solve in their life. For example, “tired of bad skin?” This empathetic opening suggests that you have an answer to an issue of theirs. Someone who is trying to get rid of acne will hear this and be interested. This goes back to the basic principle of supply in demand, filling a need in consumers' lives. 

Separate Yourself From Competitors

What do you offer that is better than your competition? Establish that your product is more advanced than what is being offered already. This kind of tactic is common among advertisers, to have something that stands out about your brand.

Every successful franchise typically offers one popular product that brings people in. For example “Apple” “iPhone”, “McDonald's” “Big Mac”, the brands have established a product that their name alone reminds you of. Find something that resonates with your brand, and something that will resonate with your ideal consumer. 

Call To Action

If your audience is interested in what you’re offering, they will want to find out more. With your compelling ad, a call to action is the extra step that will turn those interested in your ad, into customers. The call to action should be simple, “check us out here to learn more” straight to the point, and suggest that there is more to what you offer. Your ad is simply the preview of what consumers are missing out on.

Conclusion 

Creating engaging ads alone will be a big separator from competitors in today’s market. However, if you can create entertaining or informative content online in general, that will be an even bigger driver in engagement. At the end of the day, people are on social media to be happy. We use it as a break from reality and the last thing we want is to be fed ads. Use your creativity to position your brand in a way that you would be interested in if you were scrolling.

Go into the mind of the consumer, these platforms are here to benefit awareness, don’t waste the opportunity to be great. 

We work with successful companies to increase their net profits using exceptional custom software solutions, contact us here to see how we can help your business grow!