This blog will show how I demonstrated the CIPD behaviour of ‘Decisive thinker’ (CIPD 2016) as a second-term MBA student at CULC.
Firstly, it is about the ability to make prompt yet sound decisions in urgent situations based on the information given as well as common sense (CIPD 2013). For example, in an Employability & Consulting Skills (ECS) class, the teacher introduced briefly about consulting, then gave us a project and 1 hour to prepare for the first client meeting. We focused so much on the content of the project that when the meeting time came, we had not prepared how to conduct the meeting. Because none of us had consultancy experience, we did not know how to conduct it properly. However, as the group leader, I quickly decided that our group should use formal language, shake hands with the client when greeting, introduce our group as a famous consultancy firm with many achievements, and ask the client to introduce his company before moving to the main content of the meeting. This decision was totally based on my general business experience and common sense, but it turned out to be successful.
Additionally, being a decisive thinker is not all about speed. More importantly, the decisions must be reasonable as well (CIPD 2013). For instance, continue with the ECS consulting project, we were given a list of questions to prepare for the second client meeting. The questions turned out to be about consulting research skills which none of us knew much about. That affected our division of tasks because normally we let each member choose the part they prefer to tackle, but this time all the questions were equally new to us. Anyways, we still had to decide quickly, so I asked my team if random assignment was fine. Once they agreed, I allocated two questions to each person in the way that each question was tackled by two people. Because we were not confident about our randomly assigned questions, comparing and combining with another person’s answer would ensure higher quality.
Finally, a decisive thinker also follows up with his decision and supports in delivering it (CIPD 2013). I demonstrated this ability when I was a member of a group presentation in ‘Leading in a changing world’ module. My group had a rehearsal two hours before the actual presentation, and when the whole slides were displayed, I noticed some incorrect information in another part tackled by another member. At first, I asked the person in charge of that part to explain his idea, and double-checked by looking back at the theories. After being sure that the information was incorrect, I quickly decided to report that to my leader, asked him to remove it and offered to help correct it. Within the next ten minutes, I managed to provide the person-in-charge with the correct information, explain why, and suggest how he should present that information. After all, we received great feedback from our tutor, and especially the part I helped change was correct.
In short, I believe the above examples prove how decisive I am in my study at CULC. Because this behaviour is definitely important for my future career as an HR professional as well, I plan to keep it up by always staying conscious of CIPD’s guideline to apply into my daily decision-making.
References
- CIPD (2013) Decisive thinker [online] available from http://www.cipd.co.uk/binaries/Decisive%20Thinker.pdf [28 June 2016]
- CIPD (2016) CIPD profession map [online] available from http://www.cipd.co.uk/cipd-hr-profession/cipd-hr-profession-map/default.html [28 June 2016]
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