manage decision making

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Introduction and Situation

I work in a Thai restaurant style café. My position in the restaurant is head chef and Coordinator. It can get very busy during peak times and therefore have efficient and effective workers is one of the most important factors for this restaurant to be successful. One day, one of our key employees, who was efficient and hard working had to return to his home town in Thailand, and therefore there was a vacant position available. The manager gave me the duty to find a new employee.

When looking for a new recruit, there were a lot of good applicants that had a lot of experience and capabilities. However, one day, one of my closest friends asked if he could get the position. He had experience and worked very hard. I knew he needed a job and that I could help him, so I decided to recruit him. He did have a lot of experience as he worked as a chef before. He completed his training and began to work. As soon as he started working, it was obvious that the restaurant was not running well, orders were being delayed, there were a lot of mistakes and customers complained.

The manager told me that my friend was not effective, made a lot of mistakes, did not communicate well, arrived late to work, had too long break times and did not follow the organizational policies and procedures. The manager found a applicant that was highly skilled, more than 5 years experience and had very positive referrals. I had to choose, whether to replace my close friend or train him personally. If I was going to train him, it has to be outside working hours and improvement must be seen in a week.

What I Did

I wanted to keep relationship with my friend good, so I decided to personally train and mentor my friend to become a better worker. This was very difficult as I had to balance my time effectively. My friend was hard working and wanted to learn however was not trained effectively in his previous job. The manager trusted me in doing a sufficient job and that my friend will not make the same mistakes again. This decision was very rushed and my personal life was getting in the way of my work decisions. This may not be good for my career but I thought my friend would be able to pull through and become more efficient. This also required the cooking team to work a lot harder to compensate for the lack of skills and experience of my friend. This required more coordinating and managing to reduce the amount of important tasks for my friend. I should have found ways of managing the team effectively however most workers just did their own regular tasks not worrying about others. This made it difficult to improve the way the restaurant operated with the new recruit.

If I were to use professional theories and models to make my decision, the result may have been different. I could have coordinated the tasks to make the restaurant run more smoothly with the aid of theories and processes however there was no set decision making process. Garbage Can Theory or Model explains how decisions can be made without a set process but rather outcomes of events.

Garbage Can Model

The Garbage Can Theory was created by Michael D. Cohen explains the anomalies involved in decision making, specifically in the decisions made within organised anarchies. Organised anarchies are society or group of people who do not have a set government to violently enforce policies and regulations. This means that most organised teams run without a decision making process.

This was seen in our restaurant when there was no decisions being processed and the decisions were made based on the outcomes of events. If a problem occurred, it may not be resolved. This is something like the image of looking into a garbage bin and trying to find something. There is no process of looking in, just moving one piece of rubbish at a time, hoping you will find what you were looking for. Having a decision making process to fall back on when a difficult decision needs solving can be useful in make the most effective and beneficial decisions.

Academic Theories, Models and frameworks

The Eight Step Decision Making Process

If I was a more educated manager with the knowledge of decision making processes such as this Six step decision making process, the outcomes of my decisions will have changed a lot.

This decision making process is one of the most simple and standard decision making process that any organisation will benefit from. This process will give managers and decision makers, a structured and organised process that will help make decisions more effectively.

Step 1 – Identifying the problem that arose

This is the straightforward step of identifying the problem of the situation and why a decision must be made. Most decisions are related to problems and therefore must be identified.

In this case, the problem is that my friend is not working at a satisfactory level and needs to improve. He is my friend so…