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Power and decision-making.

In an earlier article, we discussed the four major types of decision-making: authoritarian, authoritative, consultative and consensual, and noted that managers should have all four in their repertories.Each is applicable to a different kind of situation. Authoritarian for emergencies, authoritative for situations where increasing the skill and knowledge of workers is essential, consultative when the goal is to engage people in the process of work and consensual when the goal is spread the decision deeper into the organization.Trust is another essential ingredient to the optimal functioning of a company. Executives and managers must trust each other or communication breaks down. Workers throughout the organization must trust their leaders, especially their immediate manager, or they will not give their best performance on a daily basis. Customers must trust the company or they will not buy the organizations products and services.One definition of leadership is to understand and use power wisely. However, thinking about power is troubling because it is difficult to define just what power is in a positive fashion. Certainly, the use of power is obvious in a reduction in force, a pay freeze or the separation of an employee. But these examples only provide specific situations where the results are generally negative. Perhaps such easily recalled examples are the reason discussions of power are difficult.Weaving the concepts of power, decision-making and trust together, we can understand how executives and managers can exercise power wisely to build trust within the organization. The key to this understanding is an in-depth knowledge of decision-making and the experience to make good decisions about how to make decisions.

It is reasonable to define the management of people as having two major components: communication and decision-making. Decision-making is a specific example of communication. Nothing communicates more quickly or emotionally than a negative decision that affects a large number of people within an organization. Perhaps this is the reason that the causal relationship between decision-making and trust is not better examined and understood.Decision-making is the most visible example of the use of power in an organization and understanding decision-making can be an important way to understand how to use the power of a managerial or executive position to build or destroy trust.