Why Collaborative Decision-Making Is Effective
Whether it’s calculating your department’s budget, delegating tasks, or implementing a new strategy, decision-making is a crucial component of a leader’s role. The choices you make affect the organization’s growth and success. There’s a lot at stake. Decision-making isn’t a magical process; there’s a definite structure and science involved. It’s never a good idea to go solo while making decisions. Even if you come up with a sound idea, it pays to seek your team’s inputs and opinions to obtain fresh and contrasting perspectives.
So, why is collaborative decision-making more effective and what are the downsides of making decisions in silos?
It’s not a good idea to make decisions in isolation. Decision-making is no longer a top-down approach. Making it a two-way conversation engages employees, fosters trust, and helps you make the right decisions with minimal flaws.
Consult Your Team for Better Decision-Making
You need your team’s advice to see a situation clearly and make the best decisions. Seeking different perspectives will help challenge your thinking, and help you identify biases and risks in your decisions.
When you operate in a silo, you’re often too close to the decision to spot its flaws. Secure, effective leaders are confident in admitting they don’t have all the answers. They welcome and value the opinions of their team.
When Hewlett-Packard ignored their employee Steve Wozniak’s inputs, he quit, teamed up with a man named Steve Jobs, and founded a little company called ‘Apple.’
You’re looking for a mix of team members who offer deep knowledge, extensive experience, as well as newcomers with fresh approaches that you may not think of. Besides, your team knows much more about their roles and jobs than you do. While you’re considering an overarching decision, their ideas relate to the day-to-day operations and hitches that may occur.
Many leaders shy away from consulting with their team before making decisions. They are wary of adding complexities, clashing opinions, and they overrate their own abilities and experience.
Good leaders involve their teams in creating solutions instead of simply handing them down them once they’re made.
The Downsides of Solo Decision-Making
When you make decisions independently, without consulting your team, they are prone to several types of errors.
First, people often rely on heuristics (or mental shortcuts) while making decisions. These may include recalling similar situations and applying the same criteria to make this decision.
Second, leaders who insist on going solo are often overconfident of their own skills, knowledge, experience, and judgment. In reality, they may not know how correct their information is or how credible their sources are for obtaining that information.
Ineffective leaders don’t know that their skills are lacking, or knowledge is outdated – and that the picture has changed. Sadly, such leaders will never know because they didn’t care to consult their teams or anybody for that matter. A classic example of this is the ‘Dunning-Kruger’ effect, where the person overestimates their skills and is blind to their own incompetence.
Third, you may make poor solo decisions due to what’s known as ‘hindsight bias.’ When you suffer from hindsight bias, you have an “I-knew-it-all-along” feeling about a situation. You feel you can predict the outcome when the situation depends on chance. As a result, you make decisions from what you learned from past mistakes instead of focusing on factors that relate to the present situation.
Lastly, if you make decisions without seeking insights, you may see relationships between unrelated variables where none exist. For example, if you have a poor experience with an international supplier, you automatically conclude that all international suppliers are unreliable.
Make the Best Decisions Using a Collaborative Approach
Unwillingness to allow your team (or others) to weigh in shows mistrust and insecurity. Secure leaders are not out to prove their independence. Asking for inputs and advice shows humility, respect, strength, and confidence.
Don’t allow your ego to dictate your actions and go it alone. Ideally, you should even be prepared to relinquish ownership of a particular idea if someone else points out potential risks and problems. Keep your mind open to valuable insights. Your team members may identify flaws or spotlight alternative solutions that can help you make better decisions. Make decision-making a team-owned process rather than playing it close to your chest. It’s not about you. Zero in on what is right rather than who is right.
Don’t mistake collaborative decision-making with consensus. When you wait for consensus, you make a decision based on popular opinion rather than one that includes differing viewpoints. The decision is mildly disagreeable and usually mediocre.
Where time, people, or big money is involved, take time to make the best decisions and actively solicit inputs. Every decision doesn’t require in-depth collaboration. According to Parkinson’s Law of Triviality, many leaders waste valuable time on minor decisions that they should make quickly. Complex decisions require inputs from people with different specializations, expertise, and skills. Involving your team will also uncover your blind spots as you listen to contrasting viewpoints and opinions. You also get buy-in from people who will implement the decision.
Seeking Inputs for Collaborative Decision-Making
Initiate spirited conversations and healthy debates before you make the decision. Avoid monologues where only one person – you – dominates the scene. Spark new ideas, reveal fresh insights, and open the floor for differing perspectives. Seeking inputs from your team and other leaders or stakeholders help you make a robust decision that everyone feels connected to.
Be specific and time-bound when you seek your team’s collaboration in decision-making. Examine the decision you need to make. At which point of the process will their opinions best add value? While asking for advice is excellent, don’t over – collaborate. Doing that will only prolong the process, and you may never arrive at a decision. Involve the right people. Seeking a homogenous group for insights is likely to preclude diverse opinions.
Don’t let the conversation be side-tracked by too many discussions and questions. Keep the dialogue to the point, crisp, and relevant. Provide the necessary information in advance so the individual or team can come prepared with their opinions.
Define the issue, not the solution. Set a collaborative decision-making framework in place.
How you frame the problem affects how your team members think of solutions. For example, “Should we change our customer feedback survey?” is a narrow question that limits options. Change that to “How do we better understand what our customers want?”
Encourage critical thinking by asking probing questions. “Can you tell me a little more about why you think that?” or “Can you provide proof of this?” Keep the conversation open and honest to prevent brainstorming from turning into consensual groupthink.
As the leader, have the last word and keep a decision-making checklist to ensure you cover all angles and risks. If you speak first, the team may want to agree with your opinion without offering differing perspectives.
You need not agree with every idea but listen carefully to what every person says. Your goal isn’t to get every team member onboard; it’s to make a decision that works.
Once you’ve considered all the viewpoints and synthesized the inputs, make your decision, and share it with your team. But the democratic process, open and respectful communication, and collaborative approach allow you to be decisive without being autocratic.
