Who Decides?

Mind Tools Newsletter 104 - July 8th, 2008 This newsletter is published by Mind Tools Ltd of 2nd Floor, 145-157 St John Street, London, EC1V 4PY, UK. You have received it because you have subscribed to our double opt-in newsletter. To subscribe or unsubscribe, just click the links at the bottom of this email

Contents: What's New? Organizing Team Decision Making The Mind Tools Career Excellence Club A Final Note

Who makes the decisions in your team? The answer usually depends on what's at stake, but - all too often - it's influenced by who shouts loudest.

For many decisions, it's necessary and appropriate for someone to take the lead in decision making (an expert or group leader, rather than the loudest!) But some things are best decided by consensus, and that takes very careful organization.

What's New?

To make decisions by consensus, you need to create the right environment and adopt an appropriate decision-making process to ensure that everyone's opinion is duly considered. Today's feature article on "Organizing Team Decision Making" looks at how to do this. Read more below!

Our second new article this week looks at the thorny issue of job insecurity. If you are living with a lack of job security, the uncertainty and practical considerations can be very stressful. Our article helps you deal with these, and learn to retain control despite the uncertainty. Click here to read it.

We're also experimenting with some new features on the Mind Tools site to help to enrich people's experience of it. Make sure that you explore the menus on our home page - you'll see that these have been expanded to include many of the articles we've published recently. Browse these, and hopefully you'll find some great new tools!

And take a look at our new self-confidence video on our self-confidence page, and build your self-confidence at the same time!

Within our members' area, the Career Excellence Club, there are new resources and discussions on topics as wide ranging as managing conflict in meetings and ethical leadership. Find out more about the unique Mind Tools community, and how it can help you, with our club tour at http://www.mindtools.com/TourIntro.htm.

This is a packed newsletter. Enjoy it, and we look forward to bringing you many more resources like this in the future.

 

James & Rachel

James Manktelow and Rachel Thompson
MindTools.com
Mind Tools – Essential skills for an excellent career!

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Editor's Choice Article:

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 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 main reasons that good companies have boards, to which important decisions are taken.

What's more, many decisions need "buy-in" from the people affected by them if they're to be implemented successfully, and 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 amount of 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 key 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 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.

Tip: If the right way forward isn't obvious, see our article on The Vroom-Yetton-Jago Decision Model. While it's quite complex, it gives you a well-thought-through decision tree that you can use to work out the approach to use.

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 can all live with.

Let's look at a few 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 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 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 very dissatisfied 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. This method is popular when time is an issue and full buy-in isn't essential for success.
  
  
• 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 key choices they must evaluate. 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.
  
  
• Anonymous Contributions
  
  Sometimes, people with deep expertise that you need to draw on may dislike one-another so much that they have difficulties working together. In others, people may need to discuss issues which are real, but unpalatable or embarrassing. In still others, proposals may need to be developed and explored in tremendous detail, suiting individual scrutiny and analysis away from a meeting.
  
  For these situations, managing the process in a way that allows anonymous and remote contributions can help you avoid destructive situations and reach a good, well-thought-through decision.
  
  With the Delphi Method, a facilitator helps participants individually brainstorm solutions and submit their ideas "anonymously" – other team members don't know who submitted which ideas. The facilitator collects and organizes the input, submits it to others for development, critique and refinement, then goes back and forth to all participants until everyone agrees to a final set of choices – and, eventually, a final decision.
  
  Conducting these discussions is very time-consuming, and you need an experienced facilitator who can help individuals come together to find a solution. But the result is usually a robust final decision that has been fully explored, and is supported by each team member.

The other advantage of the Delphi Method is its ability to eliminate groupthink. In some situations, group cohesion and consensus can subconsciously become more important to people than reaching the right decision, with the result that the group may ignore anything that contradicts the newfound consensus. If groupthink isn't recognized and corrected, it can lead to very poor decision-making and severe negative consequences.

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.

If you've found this article on decision making useful, make sure that you explore the decision making menu on the Mind Tools home page, which introduces you to 11 useful decision making tools.

You can access an additional 17 powerful decision-making tools as a premium member of our Career Excellence Club. These help you choose between options, decide whether to go ahead with a project, improve the quality of your decisions, as well as taking better group decisions. Click here to find out more.

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New in the Mind Tools Career Excellence Club

If you enjoy Mind Tools newsletter and you want to take your career to the next level, the Career Excellence Club is the place to be! Take our tour of our unique members' area to find out more.

Make career development and every-day part of your life with member-only discussions, our premium toolkit, podcast Book Insights and Expert Interviews, regular coaching and training lessons, and much, much more. Here are just some of the new Club resources featured in the past two weeks:

7 Jul Mon	Stop Playing "The Blame Game" - Finding solutions rather than finding fault When things go wrong, it's easy to start pointing fingers. Learn how to avoid this, get to the root of the problem, and move on. Premium Members' Solutions Premium Members' Read More >> Take the Club Tour >>
3 July Thur	When the Need to Control Takes Over Do you push to get people to behave more like you? It's stressful, and it's hard work. Discover the benefits of relaxing your control a little. All Members' Coaching Clinic Members: Read More >> Take the Club Tour >>
2 Jul Wed	Ethical Leadership - Doing the right thing Sometimes it's hard to do the right thing, but the consequences of failing to do so can be enormous. Learn how to clarify your core values, and spot ethical dilemmas. Premium Members' New Tool Premium Members' Read More >> Take the Club Tour >>
1 Jul Tue	Finding Your Unique Strengths This one hour training session on USP Analysis shows you how to make yourself uniquely valuable to your current organization, and to future employers. All Members' Featured Favorite Members: Read More >> Take the Club Tour >>
30 Jun Mon	The Exceptional Presenter, By Timothy J Koegel Learn about the simple formula described in this book, and make sure that your presentations are stunning, every time. Premium Members' Book Insight Premium Members: Read More >> Take the Club Tour >>
26 Jun Thur	Empowerment and Delegation How do you really empower people at work? It's much more than letting them make some decisions on their own. Find out what you should be doing, and how. All Members' Bite-Sized Training™ Members: Read More >> Take the Club Tour >>
25 Jun Wed	Managing Conflict in Meetings - Handling disagreements on the spot Find out how to troubleshoot conflict in your meeting. Premium Members' New Tool Premium Members' Read More >> Take the Club Tour >>

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A Final Note from James

We all make decisions every day, and it's easy to take our decision making processes for granted. But if you're aiming for a consensual decision, the decision-making process cannot be left to chance. I urge you to use the techniques in today's article, to ensure a truly 'team' approach!

Next newsletter, in two week's time, we're out to improve your self-motivation and boost your memory – so don't forget to join us then!

James

James Manktelow
Click here to email
MindTools.com
Mind Tools – Essential skills for an excellent career!

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