Making decisions in a collaborative work environment can be pretty time consuming. Aside from any research or planning that might be needed to inform your process, big decisions often lead to meetings, presentations, discussions, and follow up documentation and communication. Even a healthy culture can end up spending way more time thinking and talking through choices than intended. Or even worse, falling prey to decision paralysis, where no one knows who will make the call, or how to transition to action.
It doesn’t have to be that way. With collaborative cultures on the rise, I think it’s more important than ever to be mindful about how decisions are made. Some things to consider:
What decisions have we already made? One major hurdle for groups is a lack of clarity on what has already been decided. It’s the responsibility of leaders to cast a high level vision that can serve as guard rails for others as they make decisions. Don’t leave vision-level direction as spoken lore or unstated expectations. Overarching decisions that affect your whole team belong in writing.
Keeping it short and simple makes it easier for your team to remember and rely on that strategic direction when smaller decisions come up on the fly. Sometimes it may feel like stating the obvious, at least to the leader who has spent a lot of time thinking about the vision of the company. But for other employees who spend their time in day-to-day operations, having access to that thinking can make a huge difference in how they engage and make decisions.
What is the decision making process? If you’ve decided the whole team or a large group is needed for a decision, clarity around roles and process can go a long way. Be clear about the process, who will make the final call, and when they will make it. Be specific if you’re looking for more considerations and ideas, or if you’re ready to narrow and evaluate. If people try to do both at once, the conversation can get muddy pretty fast. Similarly, it’s best to be clear if you want to make a decision based on majority opinion, if you’re seeking full consensus, or if you’re compiling input for one person or a smaller group to weigh options and decide at a later time.
Do we really need everyone for this? Being collaborative can be a slippery slope, where suddenly, no one feels comfortable acting alone. That can erode your overall capacity to get things done, and make people feel less valued. Not all decisions are created equal. Some efforts merit a deeper cross functional dive, while other decisions can be entrusted to an individual. If you have strong vision and values, these can empower individuals to decide and act. If you have struggled with decision making, it might be helpful to give examples of decisions that can and should be made by one person.
Make Space for Dissent. If the desire for harmony and consensus is too great, people won’t feel safe to share differing views. To create safety for healthy debate, people need to know they won’t be penalized for respectful disagreement. One of the best ways to encourage people is to be curious about differing views. Leaders can encourage people with follow up questions and giving kudos when people speak up. A simple, “Thank you for sharing what’s on your mind.” can mean a lot to someone who went out on a limb to share a critical or differing view.
Balancing Collaboration. It can be helpful to have a culture of action or experimentation to balance collaboration. A culture of action-oriented people won’t let collaboration slow things down, but will find a habit of converging and diverging, coming together to collaborate, then working independently as needed. A mindset of experimentation helps with decision making because you soon realize you don’t need a perfect decision, but rather something you can test and play with, and improve based on what you learn.
Helpful Decision Making Tools
Here are a few of my favorite decision making tools. The first two help collect input, while the third is a great clarifying question.
Dot Voting
This process is useful when you have captured a bunch of ideas on a whiteboard or sticky notes and want to narrow your field. You give participants a limited amount of “dots,” say 3 or 4, that they can use to vote for the paths they like. The dot can be a colored sticker, or even just a dot made with a marker on the board or sticky note.
You can quickly and easily get a gut check through this process, though some say it can lead to a biased outcome, as people can be influenced by how others vote. For that reason, I think this is a better practice for gathering input rather than considering it an official deciding vote.
Decision Matrix
This tool is useful when you want to consider more than one potential path forward from more than one angle. Where a dot vote is essentially a gut check on what an individual likes, a decision matrix uses multiple parameters to evaluate an idea. For example, you might evaluate each option on its value to your customers, on whether you have the resources to sustain it, or on how well it aligns with your values. You can decide which criteria are important and customize this tool for different decisions.
You don’t need a fancy tool for this. You can create a chart on paper, or use an Excel or Google spreadsheet. Add the potential ideas on the left column, and your chosen criteria across the top. Members of your team evaluate ideas separately, adding a rating on a scale for each item into your chart or spreadsheet. Some people choose to add a weighting when one criteria is more critical than others. Here’s a how-to from Mind Tools.
We used a decision matrix to decide which areas to focus on for improving company culture at Student Connections.
The Meeting Closer
My former colleague Elizabeth Heil often closed meetings with one simple question: What have we decided? It is a powerful question because it can either solidify or clarify decisions, or expose that you aren’t on the same page. This question is especially helpful to close out meetings where multiple potential decisions were discussed. It only takes a quick moment to ask.
What are your favorite decision making tools?