Please answer each question in 1-2 full paragraphs 1. When do you feel you are m
ID: 325691 • Letter: P
Question
Please answer each question in 1-2 full paragraphs
1. When do you feel you are more likely to make decisions rationally instead of emotionally? Why?
2. Which decision-making biases are the biggest challenges for you? Why?
3. As the manager of a multicultural team, what could you do to minimize possible negative cultural effects on the team’s decision-making process?
4. Identify a decision you faced in which you were ethically challenged. What did you do? Would you do anything differently if you had it to do over?
5. As a manager, what can you do to enhance the ethics of your staff’s decisions?
6. Think of a time when you made a particularly creative decision. What elements of the decision-making process you used most influenced your creativity?
Explanation / Answer
1. Emotional Decision Making: Person is tend to take decisions emotionally when it comes to personal choices, decisions related to family, relatives and person to whom he or she share personal matters. Such decisions are taken quickly and are mainly intuition based. Emotional decisions often creates bias in overall judgment.
Rational Decision making is fact based, process driven, unbiased, risk forecasted and are taken on filtered information gathered from authentic sources. One feels to take decision rationally in the following situations;
A) Financial Decision: Almost all financial decisions are taken on rational basis as nobody wants to take decisions without knowing the returns out of it. Example: Which shares to buy? Where to invest? How much to invest? all such situations can be handled rationally. The main reasons for taking such decisions rationally are to avoid loss, to get maximum returns.
2. Working at a managerial position or team lead often I experienced few biases in my decision making process. These biases are a) Limited Time b) Halo effect c) Overconfidence
a) Limited time: Many situations one may not get ample amount of time to take decision which is completely rational. The shortage of time and demand of outcome often coverts rational decision making into the gut based or intuitive based ones. To overcome such bias is difficult for a simple reason that one is occupied with multiple responsibilities which demands different sorts of decisions and limited time.
b) Halo effect: Assumptions or perceptions based on few experiences often limit my ability to take decision which are more riskier. Its a big challenge for me to skip these perceptions as they are the outcome of my past experiences and in many instances it has benefited me to stick to or listen to those perceptions.
c) Overconfidence: Its difficult to accept that one is overconfident about his or her decisions, as one is always tend to incline towards previously taken decisions which yielded the benefit to the organization.
3. To minimize possible negative cultural effects on the team’s decision-making process I will try the following methods:
a) Brain Storming sessions: The brain storming session is really helpful to create an environment in a team where everyone get heard and respected equally. This also leads to building up ideas on others and ultimately creating most acceptable idea in a group. Brain Storming also removes the cultural barrier or attention of manager towards specific group of people.
b) Language Barrier: As the team is from multicultural background one can give full freedom for expressing things in own language which can make the environment more favorable to all the members.
c) Friendly environment: Creating friendly environment will diminishes the cultural bias.
d) Team Building activities: Sports is definitely key tool by which multicultural effect can be washed away from the team. Keeping sports sessions, trekking can help to build team within the multicultural group of people.
e) Adopting Organizational Culture: This is nothing but promoting organizational values, ethics so that all people will adopt uniform working culture. This might involve uniform at workplace, medium of conversation, religious beliefs etc.
4. I was challenged ethically by my Manager during my very first job. I was supposed to meet 10 key customers a day with average call rate of 8.5 per month. On the review meeting my Manager challenged me by asking about the call details on daily basis in front of my team and also asked for my business plan for attaining the next month sales target. Immediately I showed him the call history which was maintained both manually and via tab provided by the company. I also invited my Manager for one week joint field work so that he can cross check my call history.
This helped me in regaining the confidence of team and my manager but I often feel that I could have explained my monthly activity plan for achieving my sales target.
5. To enhance the ethics of your staff’s decisions manager should stand as a example. His own decisions should be ethical and timely he should promote this to make others aware about it. Manager should never hesitate in taking harsh decisions when any of his or her staff member do any unethical action during the work place. Manager can enhance the ethics of staff decisions by exposing them to people who has crossed the ladder of success by following strong work ethics in their respective fields.
6. While working as a placement coordinator I remember few creative decisions like finishing placement brochure 4 months prior instead of 1, not keeping pre placement talks on the scheduled day of campus hiring. I was able to take these decisions which ultimately helped us in overall process improvement by using one key element of decision making and that is feedback. Feedback is the most essential element of any decision making process. My team has taken very strong feedback from our senior placement team and also from the senior students. This feedback gave us idea where and how to improve the existing placement process. The feedback was very genuine due to which we were able to take risk and make it grand placement experience for our batch.