Any good manager will tell you how important it is to lead with your instincts. And this is true, your instincts, or gut, is often the ability to quickly evaluate evidence through the lens of your accumulated experience. Its importance should not be overlooked.
I recall having a conversation with someone who had an eye for colour coordination. This wasn’t just a natural born instinct, she lived and breathed this stuff, having gained the skill through trial and error. After decades of training, she is able to trust her instincts and inherently knows how to go on a match. Her accumulated experience helped her to hone these skills, making it look like she was a natural.
When recruiting staff, many managers will tell you how they were able to determine that someone should be hired within the first five minutes of an interview. They could also tell you of occasions when they were able to identify and mitigate arising risks before anyone else saw the writing on the wall. That is what experience does, which is often expressed as trusting your gut.
But most good managers will admit that there was at least one time when they missed a small, but consequential detail. (As we know, we often learn more from our mistakes than from our successes, a good manager usually has some mistakes in their accumulated experiences, from which they have gained valuable lessons).
As I explained to a recruitment interview panel that I was on recently, we probably will have an idea very early in the interview how successful a candidate will be, but by scoring the interview we are able to ‘check our gut’. We can make sure that we haven’t suffered any cognitive bias or blind spots that have hindered our judgement. We can make sure we have treated all candidates equally and provide documentation to verify this if needed.
By preparing interview questions in advance, which may be personalized or adapted ‘on the fly’ where necessary, you can ensure a standardized baseline for all applicants, which you can then grade. (For those interested, I would prepare between 8 and 10 questions covering a variety of topics such as Experience, Time Management, Problem Solving, Interpersonal Relationships, etc., grading each question out of 5). As mentioned, I would normally have an idea within the first couple of questions if the person was to be recruited but would have serious questions if my scoring contradicted my instincts. This is where it is good to have a panel of two or three to have a comparison as well as a justification of outcomes.
When it comes to negotiations, we won’t always have a panel, making informed decisions even more important. A simple scoresheet prepared in advance of what we expect out of a deal, noting our ZOPA (Zone of Possible Agreement), BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement), but with the flexibility of being aware of where we may benefit from added value can aid the process substantially. For more information on preparing for negotiations, see my article Negotiating and Making the Pie Bigger.
A weighted scoresheets scoresheet need not be a complicated document, it can be a back of envelope job that in time will feed into your modus operandi and become intuitive. But it is an important step in developing your interview, evaluation or negotiation skills. You should be able to intuitively come up with at least three considerations or criteria for any big decision that needs to be made, so work on honing this skill.
One of the great benefits in doing this is to mitigate the risk of poor financial choices. My article Penny Wise and Pound Foolish outlines the dangers of rushing into the cheapest option, and on too many occasions I have seen this played out when we fail to take into account all considerations in our choices. A weighted scoresheet guards against this and helps us to make informed choices. If we don’t have all the considerations at the forefront of our mind, it is too easy to default to cost as the main consideration, and not adequately evaluate other needs.
In preparing a scoresheet for a tender, I would have somewhere between 4 and 8 criteria, often linked to the Request for Proposal (RFP). So, depending on the complication of your RFP, you may want sub points within the criteria, but my recommendation is to keep it simple. I would then weight the possible scores, usually adding up to 100, and I would never have cost being worth more than 25 points. Other criteria would be fit for purpose, experience/ ability to deliver, and whatever would be appropriate for the service being sought. I would also have a more subjective consideration such as overall presentation (but also worth nothing more than 25 points).
If for example, if we were preparing a scoresheet for a financial auditor, we may find common scorings amongst the big 4 in experience, but we may find higher scorings amongst boutique auditors in fit for purpose. You want somebody who can reliably deliver the service, but the greatest need for your business may be adaptability to provide a fit for purpose service based on your specific needs. The criteria of cost and overall presentation will ultimately affect our final score outcome, leading us to an informed decision as we literally weigh up to pros and cons.
In following this process, we will make an informed decision, not just based on the lowest price or whether the suits impressed us on the day. It also helps us to be realistic about what it is we require. We often think our needs are more specialized than they actually are, so preparing weighted scoresheets keeps this in check. When it comes to tenders, this task will be easier if we put the time into preparing our requests for proposals appropriately as well.
For big decisions, whether it be for recruitment, negotiations or tender proposal evaluations, we should trust our instincts and consider how the other party presents. But we need to be able to justify our decisions. A weighted scoresheet is useful for evaluating the important criteria, it helps to keep ‘our gut’ in check and ensure that one consideration doesn’t outweigh the others.
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