It's no secret that decision making is important(95% predictive correlation with financial performance), challenging (the typical Fortune 500 company wastes an average 500,000 days per year on ineffective decision making), and the bread and butter of what senior executives are asked to do. But new research from Kingsley Gate, published with FT Longitude of the Financial Times Group, reveals further insights about the role decision making plays in executive hiring, satisfaction, and success - and what companies can do about it.
This groundbreaking research comprised a quantitative survey of 400 senior executives (C-suite, C-1 and C-2) from large enterprise companies across 5 countries and 12 industries, plus qualitative interviews with subject matter experts across a variety of fields.
The number of senior executives who have either resigned (34%) or considered resigning (29%) from a job because of dissatisfaction with how decisions were made1.
The number of senior executives who feel their personal style of decision making aligns with their organization’s style2.
The number of senior executives who never had an explicit discussion about decision making prior to taking their current role (i.e., neither in the interview stage if external or the promotion/ transfer discussion if internal)3.
The delta in job satisfaction between executives who DID have the decision making conversation prior to starting in their current role and those who did NOT.
The number of respondents who told us that improved decision making was attributable to “company leadership” and “new employees”, respectively. The fact that these factors rose to the top, well above items like “technology”, “process”, or “data” improvements (34%, 31%, 31% respectively), was surprising but indicated that people play an outsized role in shaping any organisation’s decision-making culture, effectiveness, and quality.
