Development of purchasing managers, or any other part of the senior management team in your organization, is not a once-and-for-all thing.
It requires an ongoing effort. Improvement is challenging. It requires the ability to see things as they are, to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of one’s team, one’s competitors and oneself, while not being constrained by them.
It demands an imaginative view of the future, unbounded by the restrictions of the past. Improvement is about identifying and taking advantage of the opportunities of tomorrow as well as those of today.
One defining quality of leadership is the ability to improve constantly what we do and how we do it. Day-to-day management of an organization should be seen as an opportunity for refinement and fine tuning.
The goal is not to point out errors but to improve the process.
In the words of Henry Ford: “Don’t find fault. Find a remedy. Even when improvements are made to the point that all of the problems originally identified have been resolved, leaders seek to improve continuously.”
Since senior management are the decision-makers, a key area of concern in leadership development is the process that decisions are made. The need to make decisions is an inherent element of the role of senior management.
As noted above, the decisions leadership make must be planned and deliberate as the circumstances permit and should be based upon proper consultation where possible.
Once a decision is made, however, it should not be second-guessed. Many types of problems that are likely to arise can be planned for. The range of options open in such cases can be anticipated and the implications of all options considered.
Even where this cannot be done, one must fall back on the basic principles of the organization: its mission, values and its strategic objectives. These may give sufficient guidance to the steps to be taken. Often the response is intuitive.
Organizations fail when instead of creating a process by which decisions can be made, they create a process that prevents the making of decisions. Characteristic of a decision-making process gone wrong in procurement are to subject even the most trivial decisions to several layers of approval and to extensive checks and balances.
Such measures should be proportionate to the risk that decisions of a given type realistically present. No organization can afford to bog down decision-making out of fear of phantoms.
Other problems include the failure to provide a mechanism for effective decision-making, such as a lack of a clear responsibility to report information and an absence of any authority to monitor problems and make decisions to correct them.
Senior management needs to ensure an effective decision-making process is in place within the organization and that equally effective method exists of communicating the decisions that have been made throughout the organization.
Specific requirements include:
- A smooth flow of necessary information to decision-makers. There must be clear channels for reporting and a duty to report.
- Appointment of qualified decision-makers. Not only must there be authority to make decisions, there must also be a duty to decide.
- Proper representation of affected interests (e.g. providing some method for securing input to the decision-makers from those who will be affected by decisions, so that their unique expertise can be channelled into the decision-making process).
- Creating a clear process for making and communicating decisions (rules that must be followed).
Common problems with the decision-making process include:
- Appointing unqualified people to make decisions
- Entrenching so many rights and special interest groups that any decision made will have limited effect.
- Allowing too many appeals from any decisions that is made.
Stephen Bauld is a government procurement expert and can be reached at swbauld@purchasingci.com. Some of his columns may contain excerpts from The Municipal Procurement Handbook published by Butterworths.
Recent Comments