by Stephen Danos Fast, informed decisions are the backbone of successful companies. The ideal speed of decision making is analogous to an 800-meter run, the controlled sprint where participants need to establish their position and pace once the starter pistol fires. Elite runners train rigorously to shave milliseconds off their time.
by Stephen Danos When leaders move with speed, whether in decision-making or in running efficient meetings, the benefits can spread throughout an entire organization.
Studies show that leaders ranked in the top 10 percent based on their leadership speed see positive results in the attitudes of their direct reports — 63 percent of whom say they would do everything possible to make their company successful. That’s according to the book Speed: How Leaders Accelerate Successful Execution, in which the authors propose that there is no statistical downside to speed, as long as leaders take the time to periodically pause and reassess whether their efforts are aligned to their organization's overall strategy. Business leaders who avoid these five common pitfalls can motivate their teams to execute more quickly — and at a higher level. by David Lotz Everyone has heard the saying, “If only I had one more hour in the day.” Often we’re the ones saying it. Those of us with full lives know the value of an hour, and are always looking for ways to make the most of our time. Well, I’m excited to share a story with you about how I spent five minutes over the summer setting up Smartsheet automated actions and how doing so has saved me an hour each workday since. A Manual Process Keeps Me Up At Nightby Stephen Branstetter I covet more time: more time for important work, more time with my spouse and kids, more time with friends, more time to work out and get healthy.
I used to hate creating weekly status reports. While important, they felt like a waste of time. Often, my status reports were simply a manual process of collecting data that already exists elsewhere mixed with tracking down people for further clarification. So I started playing around with ways to simplify the process and save time using Smartsheet. Automated actions are simple solutions that save me and my team time, reduce the number of status meetings, create more consistency in the frequency of our reports, and improve data quality. And these benefits free us up to focus on more rewarding projects and less on manual, repetitive tasks. by Stephen Danos How often do you make bad decisions? According to a McKinsey & Company survey, 72 percent of senior-level leaders believe that bad decisions are “about as frequent as good ones” — par for the course across their organization. As a company grows, apparently so does the potential cost of poor decision making. At the enterprise level, these undesired outcomes tend to stem from problems caused by increased organizational complexity, murky accountability, and an overabundance of data that cause decision makers to suffer from analysis paralysis.
Getting on the path to better decision making starts with recognizing and addressing these challenges — often with the help of the right enterprise-grade work-execution tool. by Stephen Danos Today, business leaders have a lot to consider when making decisions: performance analytics and other data coming in from a multitude of sources, resource and budget run rates, and much more. The faster a leader can reach the best decisions based on the best intel, the faster teams can carry out strategies, provide competitive value, and delight customers. Given the stakes, refining your decision-making process is well worth the effort, but to get the process right may require a few false starts and iterations. It will also help if your team can adopt an agile mindset, so they can take small steps in the right direction, giving you test-and-learn insights to make decision-making processes more efficient and swift.
While there’s no quick fix, here are five things leaders can do to speed up decision making — and how Smartsheet can set teams up for repeatable success. by Staff Writer There are few better real-life illustrations of the old expression “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” than in the workplace, where individuals -- each with unique experiences, skills, and talents -- come together to drive common goals. According to a study published in the European Journal of Business, Economics and Accountancy, effective teamwork is associated with a 70.5 percent increase in organizational productivity.
But merely holding positions within the same company or department is not enough to transform a group of individuals into a team. So, what does make a team? Trust, shared goals, and accountability are three vital ingredients to creating a high-functioning team -- and to accelerating your team’s productivity. |
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