What’s right for you? What’s right for me? How frequently do you come across situations where you have more than one choice to make? Don’t you wish to just run away from that dilemmatic situation? Well, running away is easy but facing that situation is what helps you to grow in an organization and define you as a person. However, it brings along a lot many challenges with it.

During these circumstances, things often get a little blurry for the decision makers and they might make a sub-optimal choice, which might appear to be right for everyone at that moment, but given a closer look, appears to be flawed. For an HR professional such situations arise more often than others, be it while framing the company policies or implementing them.

At times, the manager has to make a call going by the book while knowing at a subconscious level that it would be wrong if everyone’s interest is taken into account, however, given the situation and considering the heat of the moment one might make a decision that is not in the interest of the parties involved. Being a manager, there will always be circumstances, providing us with trade-offs between decisions, which need to be taken quickly.

While taking decisions we need to be sure that:

• We are looking at the larger picture and not just a small part of it. The managers cannot make a sudden decision without looking at the opportunity cost that he or she might be letting go as a trade-off.
• For example: An individual in an organization is being promoted as a team leader. As the manager he will be leading the same group of people with whom he was working before at the same level. He is answerable to people above him but his ex-team members still consider him as one of them. The manager was now on the horns of a dilemma as on one hand his team members did not expect a stern behaviour which leads to an undesirable situation between them and on the other hand, he did not want to lose his position.

We as managers, being over meticulous about our immediate working style, every now and then forget to see the changes in our working environment which might make our decisions, otherwise perceived to be the obvious choice, look like disasters.

As an active manager we can tackle such situations in the following ways:

• Defining fairness: We must start with defining fairness in the organisation after discussion with the immediate stakeholders, i.e. the employees for whom the policies are drawn. It is one of the most challenging things to do, as different stakeholders will always suggest policies that are contradictory to each other.
• Being considerate of different opinions: It is the responsibility of the manager to sync the thoughts of various stakeholders and choose the policies that help achieve the ultimate objective of the organisation.

In the meanwhile, it is necessary to maintain a balance by effectively communicating with the team members, discussing their issues, defining proper job roles that do not overlap and establishing cohesiveness so that everybody walks together.