Organizing Team Decision-Making

Reaching Consensus for Better Decisions

While many of the decisions we make on a daily basis are quite simple, some are not. These decisions may involve assimilating a huge amount of information, exploring many different ideas, and drawing on many strands of experience. And the consequences of the right or wrong decision may be profound - for the team and for the organization.

So, should leaders be decisive, think the issues through on their own, and take firm action? In some cases, no.

There's a limit to how much information any one individual can process, and a limit on how many perspectives one person can see. Many decisions need full group participation to explore the situation, provide input and make a final choice. As you've probably seen, groups can often make better decisions than any one person operating on his or her own - this is one of the reasons that companies have boards, and why important decisions are taken by these boards.

What's more, many decisions need "buy-in" from the people affected by them, if they're to be implemented successfully. It's hard to get this buy-in if people haven't been involved in the decision-making process.

The problem is that when you bring other people into the decision-making process, you need to approach decisions differently. These approaches vary, depending on a number of different factors, including:

• The type of decision.
• The time and resources available.
• The nature of the task being worked on.
• The environment the group wants to create.
• The amount of buy-in needed.

Understanding why and how best to organize decisions for your team is an important skill. We'll show you some useful tools to use when you want to involve your whole team in the decision-making process.

The Challenge of Team Decisions

Using team input is challenging, and it takes a fair amount of preparation and time. As the saying goes, if you put three people together in a room, you'll often get four opinions. People can often see issues differently - and they all have different experiences, values, personalities, styles, and needs.

Trying to include all of these differences in one decision that satisfies everyone can be difficult, to say the least. Team decision-making strategies should therefore be used when needed, for example, when consensus and participation are necessary.

When time is of the essence, a good decision is one that's made quickly. That doesn't usually happen with full team decision-making. And when just one or two people have the necessary expertise to make the decision, it doesn't make sense to involve the whole team - the experts provide most of the input and make the final choice anyway.

However, where the situation is complex, consequences are significant, commitment and buy-in are important, and where team members can work together maturely, team decision-making is often best.

Team Consensus Methods

When your whole group needs to be involved in the process, you need to explore consensus decision-making models. With these, each team member has the opportunity to provide input and opinions. All members discuss alternatives until they agree on a solution.

With consensus, there's often compromise. Not everyone gets everything they want out of the final decision. However, because everyone has fair input, the decisions reached are often ones that most can live with, however grudgingly.

Let's look at some useful team decision-making strategies.

• Ensuring Participation
  
  A consensus decision depends on hearing everyone's opinion. In a team situation, that doesn't always happen naturally: Assertive people can tend to get the most attention. Less assertive team members can often feel intimidated and don't always speak up, particularly when their ideas are very different from the popular view.
  
  The Stepladder Technique (explained later on) can help manage these differences. Each team member thinks about the problem individually and, one at a time, introduces new ideas to the group leader - without knowing what ideas have already been discussed. After the first two people present their ideas, they discuss them together. Then the leader adds a third person, who presents his or her ideas before hearing the previous input. This cycle of presentation and discussion continues until the whole team has a chance to add their opinions.
  
  The benefit of this process is that everyone feels heard and acknowledged. Once all the ideas are presented, the team can look at ways to narrow the options down, and so make a decision.
• Voting for Consensus
  
  Voting is a popular method for making decisions, and it's a good approach to use where opinions are strongly divided between two or three options.
  
  Unfortunately, it becomes less useful where there are many options - imagine an election where people have only one vote to choose between eight candidates: It's possible that a candidate could win with as little as 13% of the vote. This would leave 87% of people feeling unhappy with the result!
  
  Multi-voting can address this problem. Proceeding through a number of rounds of voting, individuals are given a certain number of votes in each ballot, which they can allocate to the various options any way they want. Essentially, they provide a "weighting" to their choices. They can give one vote to each of several different choices, all of their votes to once choice, or any combination in between. After all the votes are placed, the choices with the highest number of votes are carried through to the next round, until a winner emerges.
  
  This method allows more people to have input in the final decision. There may still be people who give the final choice no votes, but that number tends to be significantly reduced.
• Establishing Group Priorities
  
  A similar situation is where you need to prioritize a set of options, where everyone has different views, and there's no objective framework that people can use for decisions. (The classic situation in which this occurs is where people are allocating resources between competing projects.)
  
  Here, Nominal Group Technique provides an effective framework for ranking priorities and choosing the option that best fits those priorities. First, the team discusses the problem, and they narrow down the issues to the choices they must prioritize. From there, participants each rank their top choices. The team totals the rankings for each alternative, and the options with the highest ranking emerge as the group's priorities.

Key Points

Team decision-making is often time-consuming, meaning that it makes sense to prepare for it properly. Before you organize full team participation, make sure that it's appropriate, and that you have the necessary time and resources for it.

However, teams can often commit more enthusiastically to decisions reached through consensus. Using a variety of techniques, you can do this in such a way that everyone has a chance to contribute to the final result.

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Stepladder Technique

Making Better Group Decisions

Making decisions within a group can often be challenging. When things go well, they can go very well. However, when things go wrong, you can end up mired in conflict. Some people may fight for recognition and position, others may be over-critical or disruptive, while others may sit quietly and not contribute anything to the overall effort. Because of this, groups can often spin out of control and make worse decisions than individuals working on their own.

When this happens, it's easy to see why some people throw their hands up in frustration and give up. However, when a group works in the right way, it really WORKS. Groups that function effectively together can outperform individuals and make much better decisions.

But how do you make your group effective? How do you get all the members to contribute and inspire one another to create great ideas and solutions?

The Stepladder Technique is a useful method for encouraging individual participation in group decision making.

What is the Stepladder Technique?

The Stepladder Technique is a simple tool that manages how members enter the decision-making group. It encourages all members to contribute on an individual level BEFORE being influenced by anyone else. This results in a wider variety of ideas, it prevents people from "hiding" within the group, and it helps people avoid being "stepped on" or overpowered by stronger, louder group members.

All of this helps the group make better decisions.

How to Use the Tool

The Stepladder Technique has five basic steps. Here's how it works.

Step 1: Before getting together as a group, present the task or problem to all members. Give everyone sufficient time to think about what needs to be done and to form their own opinions on how to best accomplish the task or solve the problem.

Step 2: Form a core group of two members. Have them discuss the problem.

Step 3: Add a third group member to the core group. The third member presents ideas to the first two members BEFORE hearing the ideas that have already been discussed. After all three members have laid out their solutions and ideas, they discuss their options together.

Step 4: Repeat the same process by adding a fourth member, and so on, to the group. Allow time for discussion after each additional member has presented his or her ideas.

Step 5: Reach a final decision only after all members have been brought in and presented their ideas.

Key Points

The Stepladder Technique is a step-by-step approach to help ensure that all members of a group participate and are heard. The technique allows shy, quiet people to present their ideas before other group members can influence them, and it allows everyone to hear many different viewpoints before reaching a final decision.