Five Strategies For Decision Making In Teams

Hi there, I'm Ben Morton and welcome to another episode of the Leaders Kit Bag. It's the weekly micro edition of my podcast. Each episode is just six minutes long and is designed to provide you with tips, tools and tactics around specific aspects of leadership and management. It addresses some of the most common challenges you will face as a leader or manager. They are all recorded unscripted whilst I'm out walking in the countryside. So you'll probably hear birds tweeting in the background or just ambient noise as the people around me are going about their day to day life. That's all I'm going to say by way of an introduction. So let's dive straight in to this week's episode.

Hello and welcome to this fourth and final episode in the decision making series of the Leaders Kit Bag. So far in these episodes we've been focusing on your individual ability to make effective decisions. In today's episode we're going to look at collective decision making within teams and I've got five very tactical decision making strategies that you can take away and start using straight away with your group or team. But why does it matter? Why should we bother having clear and specific decision making processes or strategies? Well, A Bain & Co. Research report found that those organizations that have decision making processes in in Place are 53% more likely to outperform their competitors. The first strategy for you is what we call authoritative decision making. In this situation it is the leader that controls the information and the decision. This decision making strategy is appropriate when the leader has all of the relevant knowledge and data, when time is critical or when the team are likely to support the decision regardless. The benefits of this are that it's quick. The downsides are that it's not particularly participative and there's a lack of group responsibility around the decision. The second decision making strategy is consultative. Here the leader will go out and consult, discuss, gather information from experts. So the knowledge is pooled but the decision making responsibility remains with the leader. Now this is more participative, but there is still a danger that not everybody will support the decision and there still remains a lack of group responsibility and potentially commitment to the final decision. The third decision making strategy available to you is majority vote. In this situation, the information and the ultimate decision decision responsibility for the ultimate decision is shared across the entire team. Everybody is fully involved now. This is appropriate where the decision is likely to impact everybody and when everybody has information or knowledge relating to the decision that needs to be made. The danger here is that you still may not get full commitment to the decision. For example, take a team of 10 people who put a decision to majority vote. You could get a 6v4 split, which means four people in the team may be actively against the final decision. They may very strongly advocate for another decision and this will impact their commitment to executing upon the decision or strategy that's been made. Perhaps the best example of this was the UK's decision to leave the European Union with a 52, 48% split or worse. In this situation, a team of 10, you may get a 50, 50 split where the casting vote goes to the leader. In that case you've got 50% of the team who actively don't support the decision. Then the final. Sorry. The fourth decision making strategy you have is what we call consensus. Now consensus often gets confused with majority vote or unanimous agreement, when in reality it is neither. Consensus decision making involves the team debating, discussing the topic at hand with rigour, with a good degree of healthy challenge, so that you get to the point where everybody in the team feels as though they have said their piece and been listened to. This decision making strategy is appropriate when it's an important decision that everybody has information about and where that decision is going to impact the whole team and possibly the wider organization. Now the benefits of consensus is it is very participative. The downsides are it can take a long time to reach consensus and there's the risk that one or two members might hold the team hostage if they don't agree. Consensus really is about getting to the point where the team can disagree with the decision yet fully commit to it. And that brings us to the fifth and final strategy, decision making strategy for you, which is consensus with fallback. Now the fallback is an alternative decision making strategy to use if the team cannot come to a decision, cannot come to consensus at the end of a set period of time. The fallback could be majority vote, it could be the leader decides. So the authoritative decision making strategy. So there you have the five strategies. Authoritative consultative, majority vote, consensus and consensus with fallback. The key to using them is to be clear at the start what decision making strategy we are going to use. Before you start the discussion, make it clear what the strategy or process is for making that decision. And the strategy you choose should be designed to get the level of support and commitment to the decision that is needed. That's it for this episode, slightly longer than usual. If you're getting value from all of these leaders kit bag episodes, then head over to my website@Ben Morton.com where you can find the full back catalogue of Leader's Kit Bag episodes as videos or podcasts, plus a heap of other leadership resources to help you on your leadership journey. That's Ben Morton.com that's it for this episode. As always, look after yourself. Look after those you've got the privilege and responsibility to lead. And until next time, lead on.