I caught myself this afternoon facing emotional ransom from poor decision making – the equivalent of Mad Cow Disease (no laughter from the peanut gallery please) run amok in my company.

 It started out simply enough.   In the process of growing our company through Strategic Planning, we identified a critical need, which would provide us increased market share, exciting work, high revenue growth and diverse opportunities that aligned with our core company competencies.  We built a model to address the need, defined job descriptions and organization structure and began our search.   We took advantage of some great online application tools from New-Hire.com to quickly assess candidates’ against our benchmark and used additional cultural, communication and leadership tools to assess those under consideration for leadership positions.  The current economy helped us in the sheer volume of talent options we were afforded.  We set up interviews for the job candidates with customers, partners and employees to ensure a good fit.   But in our excitement, we neglected to really listen to what all parties were really saying (or in some cases – not saying), and any plan B began to seem irrelevant and a waste of energy.  The time invested became inversely proportional to the degree of objectivity in any discussion.  Only by stepping back and getting 3^rd party feedback did we see what had happened and that we needed to change course.  Our desire to achieve our goals blinded our decision making by taking the process hostage to a perceived pending emotional reward.

The lesson?  Gut is great (yes, Malcom Gladwell's book Blink has powerful lessons for business leaders), but there’s nothing that beats objective ears, eyes, years of experience and brain cells to assist you in the decision making process.  All very good reasons to think about how you’re ensuring you get reality checks, perspective and objectivity in your strategic planning process.