Last week, I found myself trapped in a fast food restaurant. This restaurant boasts that they have served more than six billion. Still, the people in front of me seemed to be having a new experience; they simply could not decide between meal one and meal two. To call them indecisive would be an insult to equivocators all over the planet.
There is one factor that will shape your business more than any other, and that factor is your ability to make decisions, and empowering your employees to do the same. Whether it is a hiring issue, a pricing issue, a customer service issue or any of the myriad decisions that we all face on a daily basis, your ability to decide and move forward will impact your business more than any other factor for the next 90 days.
Truth be told, this ability to decide has already shaped the business you currently have. The decisions you have made (or have avoided making) have consequences.
Your willingness to entrust your frontline service providers with decision-making power will affect the face you put out to the world. If they have to constantly ‘check with the boss’, the customer's frustration level grows. On the other hand, ‘I can take care of that for you right now’, will grow trust and relationship. Empowering employees to build their skills, confidence and more importantly, your customer loyalty.
Every creature on the planet makes decisions. How powerful are these decisions? Next time you are out in your car, take a look and see if you can find any members of the squirrel family who happen to be indecisive. They will be the flat-headed ones squished in the middle of the road. They made the decision to cross the road. Some may never know what hit them, but for some, they saw the car coming. They just were not able to decide whether to move left or right.
