Achieving effective
team decision-making

Consensus decision-making models allow team members to provide input and opinions

By Angela Civitella

Previously published in WestmountMag.ca

Effective team decision-making is a dynamic process that thrives on clear, structured approaches and collaborative engagement. By fostering an environment of open communication, diverse perspectives, and active listening, teams can transform potential conflicts into opportunities for deeper understanding.

Successful decision-making requires establishing transparent processes, developing standard evaluation criteria, and involving key stakeholders who will implement the decisions. Through careful documentation, constructive dialogue, and regular performance audits, teams can create a robust framework that not only generates innovative solutions but also builds trust, encourages meaningful participation, and ultimately increases the likelihood of successful outcomes.

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. Is it then the role of leaders to be categorical, to solve problems on their own, and to act unilaterally? Not necessarily.

In complex situations where the consequences are significant, securing commitment and buy-in becomes crucial.

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 several 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. You can use some of the methods described below 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 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. Team decision-making strategies should therefore be used when you want to get participation and achieve consensus.

‘When team members can work together maturely, team decision making is often best.’

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. 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.

Team consensus methods

When your whole group needs to be involved in the decision, 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 all can 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. So how about doing the following: 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 the 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.

‘When your whole group needs to be involved in the decision, you need to explore consensus decision-making models.’

The benefit of this process is that everyone feels heard and acknowledged. Once all of the ideas have been 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 percent of the vote. This would leave 87 percent of people feeling very dissatisfied!

Proceeding through several 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 one 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.)

‘Voting is a good approach to use where opinions are strongly divided between two or three options.’

You can provide an effective framework for ranking priorities and choosing the option that best fits those priorities. First, the team discusses the problem, then team members 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 that 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.

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, and 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.

‘Managing the process in a way that allows anonymous and remote contributions can help you reach a good, well-thought-through decision.’

You have to try and overcome the tendency to go towards group thinking. 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 group thinking isn’t recognized and corrected, it can lead to very poor decision-making and severe negative consequences.

Image: rawpixel.com from Pexels

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