Creating Training Tools

Making decisions and essential skills

Making decisions is a vital skill that allows people to confidently select one alternative from a variety of options (Zsambok and Klein 1). Task skills, relationship skills, and procedural skills are the essential abilities that a person must have in order to reach for great possibilities or make ideal decisions. The ability to identify a specific issue or problem, frame the recognized problem, draw interference, produce an ideology that best fits the situation, and defend the generated ideas are all task-related abilities. While procedural skills include process execution and planning, relational skills include dispute management, leadership, and climate development (Zsambok and Klein 4).

Different decision-making strengths of employees

Most managers in typical workplaces promote a culture in which all employees are let to make their individual choices. However, different employees have diverse decision-making strengths. A StrengthsFinder test is a crucial tool that allows individuals to assess their decision-making capabilities.

Employee A - The strategic decision-maker

Employee A takes the test and realizes that he is a strategic decision-maker. The individual is a quick thinker and can make more than 50 decisions regarding a single problem. As the team discusses different options for a given issue of concern, Employee A quickly identifies the elements of the issue of concern and comes up with different decisions with diverse implications. Employee A also interrupts the team’s process of decision making most occasions due to his speedy thoughts and with quick ideologies that save the group reasonable amounts of time. The team has also learned to trust the decisions that he makes since they turn up to be accurate. However, some of the choices that Employee A advocates for are never reasonable and the team is forced to engage in further discussions to find other ways out of the problem.

Employee B - The deliberative thinker

Employee B is a deliberative thinker who is extremely focused, vigilant and careful in decision-making activities. The team member provides well-thought decisions to most of the issues discussed after careful review of the consequences. However, unlike Employee A, the team member can only make few decisions, and in some cases, Employee 2 lets others make decisions. Employee B also leverages opportunities to allow her to take more risks with the options that she deems fit. Therefore, once this individual identifies the opportunities and thought them through, she sets strategies that would allow her to pursue her intended results with stamina.

Approaching Decision-Making

The two employees form vital parts of the group with their unique sets of skills. Employee A is a quick thinker who excavates opportunities from ideologies that other employees would deem irrelevant or useless. Quick thinkers are beneficial team members due to their ability to look for alternative ways of breaking through an obstacle (Zsambok and Klein 94). Strategic thinkers also introduce a new array of thought due to their flexibility. Therefore, Employee A’s skills can be exploited to produce excellent results by involving them in situations that require urgent decisions to be made. The team member can also be involved in decision-making issues that do not have enormous implications on the company thereby giving room for wrong decisions.

Employee B is a valuable member of the team. The decisions made by the individual are well-thought thereby enhancing their accuracy. According to Zsambok and Klein (28), deliberative thinkers avoid making mistakes that would cost the entire team. As such, they provide brief and accurate thoughts and allows other team members to ponder on their thoughts. Employee B’s key strengths that the management can exploit to produce the most accurate results include vigilance, privacy, soundness, and carefulness. Consequently, the team member can be involved in crucial decisions whose implications are delicate. The skills of the team member are also vital as they can be utilized in decisions that require a relatively long time to be reached.

Developing Employees with Different Strengths

Managers and team leaders are instrumental in the enhancement of the skills of their followers. Employee development is one of the key responsibilities of the stewards who would wish to lead successful teams. The creation of individual development plans is the first procedure that managers ought to take to develop employees with diverse decision-making strengths (Zsambok and Klein 149). The development plans can only be made after thorough discussion with the employees to determine their interests, strengths, fears, and weaknesses. Frequent conversations between leaders and their followers allow the stewards to identify the most appropriate development activities that each team member should undertake. Excellent development plans contain a set of realistic goals that are to be achieved within a reasonable timeframe. In this case, the manager could identify that the two employees are strategic and deliberative thinkers and create a development plan that would exploit their strengths.

The second strategy is the provision of a performance metric. Performance metrics assist employees in realizing their current states and where they need to be within a certain duration or the activities that they can undertake to achieve their objectives (Zsambok and Klein 176). StrengthsFinder test is an excellent tool that informs the employees their current states. The manager can utilize the findings of these tests to set the bar that all the employees should meet. Managers must also establish systems that would allow them to assess or measure the progress of employees regarding the performance metrics. In summary, the combination of effective leadership and performance metrics help in driving accountability.

Managers can also develop their employees with different strengths by providing opportunities that are outside the job functions. The current workforce is compartmentalized to the extent that individuals only believe that they can successfully operate only within their function (Zsambok and Klein 259). The creation of opportunities for the employees with different strengths outside the workforce would increase their awareness and knowledge thereby enabling them to work effectively with one another. Deliberative and strategic thinkers like employee A and B in the scenario can effectively work in different environments that would promote the development of both fast and accurate decision-making skills.

The final approach that a manager should take to develop employees with diverse strengths is the provision of appropriate feedback (Zsambok and Klein 365). A proper feedback is constructive and entails detailed recommendations that would allow employees to undergo self-improvement and development. Feedback also provides the opportunity for the employees to understand what they are doing. Whenever Employee A makes a quick but wrong decision, the manager should communicate his or her feedback appropriately giving recommendations on the most appropriate measures that he can undertake to improve the accuracy of his choices. Employee B should also be advised regarding the various strategies that would improve her decision-making speed.

Conclusion

In summary, the key reason for decision making is to allow individuals to cope with the environment as the choices that they make have diverse implications. The primary skills that an individual must possess to enable them to reach for excellent options or make perfect decisions include task skills, relational skills, and procedural skills. This paper explores a scenario involving two employees who are deliberative and strategic thinkers as indicated by the StrengthsFinder test. The various steps that managers ought to take to develop employees with diverse decision-making strengths include the provision of feedback, performance metrics, opportunities that are outside the job functions, and the creation of individual development plans.

Work Cited

Zsambok, Caroline E., and Gary A. Klein. “Naturalistic Decision Making.” Naturalistic Decision Making, New York: Psychology Press, 2014.