Decision-making at the workplace

Decision-making is integral to success at work, but it can also result in failure if the conditions aren't right and if everyone isn't on the same page. There must be commitment, knowledge, and objectivity.

There are several parts to successful, efficient, productive decision-making in the workplace:

• Identity
• Know yourself as well as the rest of your group
• Gather data
• Evaluate
• Select
• Develop plan (steps from Laura Osteen)

Additionally, it's important to keep the following in line:

• Don't make it personal; keep the problems separate from the people and focus on the issues
• Focus on interest, not positions; worry about where you're going rather than how things seem
• Allow for mutual gain; find ways that everyone can benefit
• Accept objective criteria

A critical part of working in a group includes making positive, productive decisions together, but this can be difficult with different people working in a group. For example, there are times when my team and I get a little lazy and we make decisions that are not necessarily best for our middle school students, but are instead easier to accomplish and get us out of the office. There are times that we need to create lesson plans for our workshop sessions, but instead of working to make lessons from scratch to perfectly suit our students and their knowledge and needs, we find lessons online that are do the job, albeit not to a tee. My team’s mission is to fully engage students in social issues and community service in order to encourage them to continue such service without our program, and to take genuine interest in their communities. However, if we are not dedicating ourselves to our mission to our students, we can’t expect our students to get what we want them to from our program. I think that there is a way to discover or create a way that there can be mutual benefit for my team and our students; we should have an outlook so that we see working more on lesson plans as positive and advantageous rather than more work.