Quick and Effective Ways to Improve Your Consensus-Building Skills
Photo by Daria Nepriakhina 🇺🇦 on Unsplash
Whenever I have the chance, I like to ask the teams I work with, “How do you make decisions?” In recent years, without fail, they say they like to reach a consensus. So how do leaders know if they’ve reached a consensus on any given topic?
Here’s what I’ve seen.
Leaders start by getting input from whoever would like to speak up. Maybe they learn the history of the problem and get some ideas for how to move forward. Once someone comes up with a decent idea, someone, often the leader, will say something to the effect of, “ That sounds good to me. What do you all think?” They look around the room and see a few nodding heads indicating their agreement, and no one is shaking their head no. “Ok, great, let's move on to our next thing.”
“While there are six effective ways to make decisions, building consensus is important, especially for those decisions that require a lot of buy-in to accomplish well. ”
The scenario above might be an adequate process for deciding where we’ll have lunch or how to celebrate a teammate’s birthday. However, this process lacks some rigor for the decisions that are important, have high stakes, and/or have long-term impact. Those types of decisions merit a rigorous, longer process and often benefit from an outside facilitator.
Many decisions could benefit from hearing more from the quiet members, increasing the number and variety of opinions, and even experiencing a little dissent.
Making Our Everyday Consensus Decisions Stronger
No team has enough time or resources to use a rigorous process or outside facilitator for many decisions. So how do we improve the quality of our more common, everyday, consensus-style decisions that need to be made more quickly and yet effectively?
Here are my top tips:
1. Confirm that this decision is a good candidate for consensus building. Getting agreement from a group takes time, and most groups really don’t want to be part of every single decision. They probably don’t care what brand of electric kettle is purchased for the break room. Some decisions are served well with a different decision-making style.
2. Confirm whether a decision has been made or not. How many times in our groups (or even in our marriages), have we been unsure if a decision was actually made or if that last statement was still just draft thinking?
Just taking a moment to say “Is that draft thinking or a decision?” will bring a ton of clarity to the room.
3. Re-state or write out the decision as a complete sentence. Doing this can save so many troubles down the road—removing the “I thought we said we’d do X, but now you’re saying Y.” Posting or sharing those written decisions will also help everyone be clear. A simple group text can sometimes suffice.
4. Do “a round of.” This is an opportunity, just before or sometimes just after a decision is made, to actually learn some things. Going around the group and asking each person to share specific input has the potential to greatly increase the quality of your decision.
A Round of Concerns: Asking each person to voice a concern can surface big things that merit a pause or a complete re-look. It can also surface small things that, with an easy adjustment, can greatly increase the quality of the decision. It gives voice to concerns that may not feel welcome without specifically asking for them.
A pre-mortem: A post-mortem seeks to figure out why something died. A pre-mortem asks the question, “If this decision were to fail, what would cause its demise?” Similar to the round of concerns above, doing a pre-mortem gives a healthy voice to things some groups find hard to discuss, maybe because voicing those topics doesn’t fit the group’s culture. Nonetheless, these may be important to surface.
Percent Buy-in. This is probably my favorite. Remember our opening story about the leader who looked around the room, saw some heads nodding, and thought, “Ok, we’ve all agreed”?
The truth is that the leader didn't really know if those head nods meant, “Yes! I’m all on board with this idea and couldn’t be more excited!” or if they just meant, “Ok, let’s just move on.” And what about those that were silent? Was that silent seething, or just boredom? Did the group really reach an agreement?
With this method, you ask each person to share a number from 0–100 to indicate how “bought in,” “on board,” or in agreement they are with the decision at hand. Leaders can decide and share ahead of time that the group will move forward with the decision if everyone (or the average, or all but one, etc.) is above a predetermined level. If that level is not met, then you can hear from the lower percentage people what tweaks might help them be in higher agreement with the decision.
This process helps increase buy-in from all individuals and increases the quality and efficacy of the decision.
5. Decide on Next Steps. While I wish this could go without saying, it can’t. Too often a decision is made, but how it will get implemented is neglected. Just answering, “Who will do what by when?” will help those decisions you worked so hard on get accomplished.
6. Communicate. This is part of the “next steps phase,” but it merits its own line. It should be common sense, but too often, it doesn’t happen. When neglected, poor communication has the potential to cause hard feelings and reduce trust in groups. Consider who this decision impacts. Who isn’t in the room who needs to hear about this? Who will share this information with them and when?
Taking a Moment to Assess
I imagine your team is already doing some of these tips quite well. Consider a group consensus decision your group recently made. Which of the above tips were included? Which were neglected? Which two or three might have improved the quality of your consensus-building decisions?
Download our questions to help you apply this article to your team or group.
