Decision Making

How does your church make decisions? Who ultimately makes the call?

This Saturday a.m. as I wait for the temperature to reach 40 so I can get on my bicycle for the first time in over a month, I picked up January's issue of the Harvard Business Review. This issue is all about decision making (Better > Faster > Smarter). The best article, in my opinion was written by Paul Rogers & Marcia Blenko called "Who has the D?. How Clear decision Roles Enhance Organizational performance". My takeaway for this article, and I hope you find it useful is what that authors call RAPID. Good decisions depend on assigning clear and specific roles in the decision making process within your management team. Here is how RAPID is broken down.

• Recommend - People resonsible for making a proposal, gathering input, and providing date to the rest of the team in a timely fashion.
• Agree - This person has the veto power over the recommendation. This should lead to a mondified proposal.
• Input - These people push back on the recommendations. Did we look at everything?
• Decide - This is the formal decision maker. He or she is ultimately accountable for the decision.
• Perform - Once the decision is made, this is the person who must implement a decision. Usually this is the same person who was the recommender.

When this process is slowed down its usually the result of one of three things.

1. Lack of clarity on who Decides
2. To may people have veto power. This can make live very hard for the recommending
3. To may people giving input is a signal that some of it may not be meaningful.

I'm going to put this process into practice at our next management team meeting. I hope it will help us move the ball down the field quicker.