Chapter 9 Overview

What’s in It for Me?

Reading this chapter will help you do the following:

  1. Understand what decision making is.
  2. Know key causes of faulty decision making.
  3. Compare and contrast individual and group decision making.
  4. Understand how to develop your own personal decision-making skills.

Figure 11.2 The P-O-L-C Framework

While leadership is a combination of many things, your characterization of particular leaders and their leadership effectiveness is often a reflection of the decisions that they have made or not made. In this chapter, you’ll learn that while decisions are made every day within organizations, the process does not always go as well as it could. Understanding how decisions are made, how they can be biased, and how to make the decision-making process run smoothly will help you to be a more effective manager. But first, let’s define decision making.