Balance unit and company needs
Some decisions involve trade-offs between your department or group and the company overall.
For instance, suppose you lead a sales group whose representatives have won numerous new accounts by promising customers early delivery dates on a new product. That's great for your group. However, it puts a burden on the product development, manufacturing, order processing, and customer service departments—all of whom must accelerate their processes in order to meet the promises the sales reps have made.
This situation may lead to several possible outcomes:
- Your group's actions may have a negative impact on other groups. For example, forcing product development to release a product early may jeopardize the quality of the product. This in turn, might affect product development's unit strategy of trying to raise the quality standard of all products.
- In the end, your group's actions could thus eventually hurt relationships with other groups and with longstanding, existing customers.
In this case, you might need to consider whether to trade off some new sales in return for smoother operation of the rest of your company's functions—so your organization can serve all its customers, not just the newest ones.