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Decision by data

By Brian Horn

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Kim Allan Sharp
President and CEO, FocusMark Group LLC

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Kim Allan Sharp, the founder, president and CEO of FocusMark Group LLC, has a saying he has adhered to all his life: “Not always right but never in doubt.”

The statement reflects Sharp’s view on how important it is for a leader to not only make decisions but also to empower employees to make decisions. He says employees need to know a leader has the decision-making ability to execute on the vision of the company.

“If the leader or the CEO doesn’t make the decision necessary to execute your vision, obviously, everything bogs down,” says Sharp, who led the marketing agency to 2007 revenue of about $40 million.

Smart Business spoke with Sharp about how he uses data — and gut feelings — to make decisions.

Q. How do you empower employees to make decisions?

Many times, I’ll bring everybody — or the particular employees — in, and we’ll talk about what are the options, and we’ll narrow down those options to two or three options.

What I’m always about is, ‘I can make this decision for you right now, but here is what I think, from a consensus standpoint, we agree [that these] are the logical options that fall in line with executing our vision. It’s up to you to decide which one of those routes to take.’

At the same time, understand that you’re going to be held accountable from a revenue standpoint or from an employee morale standpoint, whatever road you take. In many ways, I believe, if you can educate your employees, they will help you make those decisions, and, quite frankly, usually they make the decisions you’d make anyway.

Q. How do you educate your employees to make those decisions?

We’re very numbers-oriented, so we look at it from a numbers standpoint. That can be financial numbers, those could be marketing numbers, those could be numbers regarding square footage of a building.

We always have a way of saying, ‘OK, let’s say here’s what the numbers tell us,’ and we’re a numbers-processed, engineering-type organization in everything we do. What we then say is, ‘OK, even though we know these are what the numbers are, we all know, even if you are a good statistician, that about 20 percent of a good statistician is that gut feeling or the subjective nuances that you bring into your final decision-making.’

So, we try to balance it.

Providing people with facts and figures and then mixing that with your good, old, ‘OK, this is what my instincts tell me,’ that’s the best way to have a powerful mix of information that allows and empowers our employees to make the right decision.