EXECUTIVE EDUCATION

How business leaders can sharpen their decision-making skills

SOURCE: MARK RALSTON / AFP
Business leaders must be decisive to steer their business in the right direction.


By U2B Staff 

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Business leaders often make decisions that can have a lasting impact on the companies they represent, including whether a company succeeds or falls into a downward spiral. This bolsters the need for effective decision-making to ensure they help organisations stay in the direction. 

It takes a lot of confidence to make tough decisions in a timely manner within a complex business environment. There can be an overwhelming amount of data, making it easy for any business professional to fall into analysis paralysis.

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Our current, fast-paced digital world accentuates the need for senior executives and managers to refine their decision-making skills. Great business leaders are decisive and agile in adjusting their sails to the winds of change.

Combining analytical thinking and intuition can take practice, but executive education can offer business leaders some respite. Exec-ed is a graduate-level education that culminates with a certification. They are helpful for professionals who want something more targeted for their professional development.

Depending on the programme, they can be ideal for high potential managers to C-suite executives seeking new skills and knowledge.

What can an exec-ed course on decision-making help you with?

There are many variations of decision-making courses catered to business leaders to help them enhance their decision-making skills.

Cass Business School’s exec-ed programme Strategic Decision Making for Leaders is for executives and senior managers across all departments who are moving from tactical to strategic roles and are involved in cross-functional decision making. 

The course aims to help learners develop tools and techniques to make strategic decisions and build optionality into the decision-making process, gain insights into the human side of decision-making as explained by behavioural decision science, and practice analysis and decision making in a safe environment to improve their performance in the workplace.

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Yale School of Management’s Leading Effective Decision-Making is a six-week programme. It aims to prepare executives to provide structure and clarity to uncertain situations, incorporate a broad range of perspectives and inputs to surface previously undiscovered options, evaluate those options in a systematic and data-driven way, assess potential risks, and balance risks and rewards to generate high-return decisions for their business.

The course aims to broaden the perspective of executives while making difficult trade-offs. It can also help learners swiftly and effectively approach gaps in knowledge and expertise and scale their efforts to accommodate the scope of the issue, as well as time/resource constraints.

Ultimately, there are many related exec-ed courses that can help business leaders improve their judgment and critical thinking skills, understand frameworks that help with decision making, and understand the psychology that inhibits it. This could make it an area worth investing in.