From the course: Making Key Decisions as a Manager

What is a key decision?

From the course: Making Key Decisions as a Manager

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What is a key decision?

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- As a manager, you're making decisions all day. This course is about the key decisions that you must make, which begs the question, what are the key decisions? How do you differentiate those from all the others? Well, some decisions are quickly made without significant long-term ramifications or much controversy among your team members. But others might be riskier, require more buy-in from stakeholders or demand some strategy and extra time to consider all the possible outcomes. Chances are you already make the quick, non-significant decisions, and that's working. If not, you likely recognize it, and this course will help give you some new ideas. But for now, how do we categorize key decisions? For this course, we'll consider the key decisions to be those that are more complex, have longer-term impacts, are more important to the overall organizational outcomes, involve more people and require the effort and commitment of others for success. Let's make this clearer with a couple of examples. One, you need to determine how to ship a product to an existing customer when there's been a problem. Two, you must solve a long-standing customer problem that has happened multiple times in the past. In the first situation, it's pretty simple. Just decide how to ship it, or probably better, let the person who asked you decide for themselves. But in the second one, there's likely a process that needs to be considered, meaning multiple people are involved, and so more information is probably needed. Based on some basic assumptions, nearly all of the boxes for a key decision are checked here. Now that we know what a key decision is and where our focus will be for this course, we can start learning the building blocks and tools for making better decisions.

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