Decision-Makers or Order-Takers?

Is your company being transformed? Much of the business world is being transformed from a blue-collar world of order-followers into a white-collar world of decision-makers.  When the key work was on the assembly line, people just needed to follow instructions. Today, the key issues deal with the fast pace of change, especially in business competition. More of us work on the front lines and the decisions that we must make are much more complex. Most of us are simply not getting the tools we need to make those decisions quickly with limited information.

It is simple: If your company consists mostly of order-takers, your people do not need our training. If your company consists increasingly of decision-makers, you do.

What the Research Tells Us

A six-year study of the challenges facing today's organizations by the Ken Blanchard Companies® identified the main issues facing executives. This study interviewed over 4,900 executives, line managers, and training and HR leaders from a range of companies, industries, and countries. The people painted the picture of a world  in which people's roles are changing.

These people said that their most pressing needs were to create an more engaged workforce, manage change, and develop potential leaders. The top four challenges they listed were competitive pressures, economic challenges, growth and expansion, and skills shortages. All of these issues revolve around the changing nature of work in our information age.

Competitive pressure puts more pressure on us all to understand our competitive position both in our organization and representing our organization in the market.  Since few are trained in competitive decision-making, we waste time and effort creating unnecessary competitive conflict. The shortage of people who have the experience to make good decisions inhibits growth and expansion of companies, but that means that those who can demonstrate good decision-making skills are quickly promoted. The expertise most in demand is the ability to make the creative decisions under competitive pressure. This is exactly the training we offer.

The Top Challenges

When asked to rate the top challenges facing their companies, executives described this changing role of the workforce. Twenty-three percent saw this primarily as an economic challenge. Eighteen percent said it was a culture change. Thirteen percent said it was the competitive pressures. Twelve percent said the skill shortage. And twelve percent saw it as a problem with innovation and creativity.

When asked to to choose the top five issues that they would focus on, the issues were:

1. Creating an engaged workforce (58%),
2. Managing change (55%),
3. Developing potential leaders (53%)
4. Selecting and retaining key talent (50%)
5. Communicating mission, vision, values (39%)

Issues that were once topped this list, such as controlling costs, declined dramatically over the six years of the study, from 58% to 38%. Meanwhile, the top issue, creating an engaged workforce continues to grow steadily in importance over this same period of time. If you are an executive today, you want people who can understand strategic situations and act accordingly. This situations just keeps getting worse because the traditional training offered by most employers simply doesn't address is. When asked to pick just one issue to focus on, the most popular response was creating an engaged workforce. Given this situation, the innovative companies are training their people in   creative competitive thinking rather than processes alone.

Workforce Training Challenges

When it comes to expressing what this transformation of the workplace means in terms of employee training, executives found many ways to they express the challenge.

A large majority (78%) see the challenge in terms of "performance management." How do you judge the quality of people's competitive decisions? Managers cannot evaluate each decision without making their people feel that their every decision is second-guessed. This is one of the problems executing strategy. Most managers have no idea how to evaluate people's decision-making skills in a generic way, non-threatening way. 

Nearly as many (74%) also see this as a problem with "management skills" because decision-making has traditionally been a management job, even though developing front-line decision-making skills is different from traditional management training. Interpersonal communication skills (63%), team building skills (59%), customer relationship skills (58%) and the ability to innovate (42%) all part of this picture of training your people to be more effective for the future.

Key executives are clearly aware of the need to engage their people into thinking and acting more competitively. However, most are at a loss for ways to actually do this.  This failure is seen in terms of executing corporate strategy which has been traced directly to the problems with front-line decision-making.