Decision Making at Various Levels
Many of the decisions that the sales managers make on a daily basis are procedural decisions that are dictated …show more content…
In our department, it has been observed that many decisions are avoided because of the larger and more tedious task of making procedural decisions or the desire to not make a decision that is going to take a lot of time or research. Additionally, the avoidance of these decisions is impacting our sales and is having a negative impact on the motivation of our staff. It is my suggestion, based on this research, that dedicating additional time to these problems and dilemmas and making some of the decisions before the required deadlines that are more difficult to make, like who our new chemical supplier will be and what we will carry in our new product lines, we will increase the likelihood that our sales will return to or exceed appropriate levels while increasing the representative’s satisfaction because they spend less time worrying about how a manager’s decision will affect them and their position within the company or in our case, within our department …show more content…
When a company employs people who make a decision quickly, those managers are viewed as higher performing and as discussed earlier, it also reduces uncertainty among the the subordinate staff and according to research, produces higher performing staff (1996). While some may find this strategy too risky, I contend that avoiding the risk, as our department does now, is encouraging our declining sales in a negative manner for most cases. In Alex Lowy’s article on the paradoxes of problem solving, the author discusses this in what he calls Herbert Simon’s dilemma and the paradox where the solution is the problem (2011b). Herbert Simon’s dilemma discusses the paradox that in some cases a manager has to make use of their creativity and make things up to compensate for lacking information (2011b). This is a risk, but if our department is unable to get creative and risk being wrong, it is my opinion that our sales will not recover. Lastly, in Lowry’s fourth paradox, the author discusses the notion that business dilemmas can be highly complex and find short term solutions can actually mask the underlying problem and worsen it (2011b). In our department, this type of Band-Aid fix, like ordering sub-standard supplies during a shortage of our regular products, can cause