Decision Marking Process

Decision making is a mental process of choosing alternatives to solve a problem. Decision making is a crucial leadership skill because a manager can lead his team toward success if he knows how to make timely and effective decision. On contrast, if the manager make a poor decision, the whole team may be driven down. CEO of a company often does not have a lots of time to make a decision, therefore, he needs a certain skill set to be able to make a good decision within a limited time. Making good decision can be learned through life experiences. There are six steps that we can consider during a process of making good decision. These steps are as the following:

Step 1: Define a problem. In this step, we should ask ourselves what exactly the problem that need to be solve? Then, we need to look deep down and find the root cause of problem.

Step 2: Identify decision criteria. We need to make a list of criteria that we can rely on when choosing alternatives and making decision. Depend on the complexity of a problem and personal preference, different person can come up with different list of criteria.

Step 3: Weight the criteria. Criteria are then assigned a weight. The most important criteria should be ranked number 1 in the list and has the most weight.

Step 4: Generate a list of alternatives. After having a list of criteria, we can come up with alternatives that can fit in these criteria.

Step 5: Evaluate each alternatives. We look at our alternatives, score them based on the list of criteria, and rank them in a order of preference. This step helps us to determine how final decision will have an impact on ourselves and others who are involved.

Step 6: Compute the optimal decision.