How can we create a culture where teams get behind a big decision?
Getting your team behind a decision and execute even though they don't agree with you is every leader dream behind decision-making. But a lot of times that's not what happens.
The leader will make a decision that many people may disagree with. Some team members will not put in any extra effort to execute on it. They might even badmouth or fight against the decision.
When a team isn’t behind a decision, it can be much more challenging to execute it. Leaving people feeling frustrated, confused, annoyed, unheard, and unsafe. But that doesn't have to be the norm when making team decisions. People can disagree and still get behind the decision.
So, how do we get people behind a decision? As a business consultant who works with teams to develop collaborative and productive team cultures, I’ve gotten to work with teams to get unified even if they don’t agree.
In today’s video, I'm going to share with you a little bit about the process behind team decision-making, much of which I learned through the book Participatory Decision-Making. I’ve used this model with a variety of teams which helped them become more aligned and united.
Transcript
Getting your team behind a decision and execute even though they don't agree with you is every leader dream behind decision-making. But a lot of times that's not what happens. A lot of times. The leader will make a decision and not only do people disagree, but they're not going to put in any extra effort to execute on it. They might even badmouth the decision that's being made.
They might even fight against the decision, making it so much more challenging to actually execute on the decision leaving people feeling frustrated, confused, annoyed, unheard, and unsafe. But it doesn't mean that that has to be our norm for our team culture when we're doing a collaborative decision making. We can absolutely have it that even though people disagree that they still get behind the decision. So, how do we do that? Well, my name is Michael Vargas.
I'm a business consultant who works with teams to develop collaborative and productive team cultures. And today. I'm going to share with you a little bit of what I learned through the book Participatory Decision-Making, and I've used this with a variety of teams and I found sharing this information sharing this experience has been really helpful for teams.
So let's talk about the general process of it as you see in the beginning. Someone might bring up a topic of what we want to make a decision on and it's very easy to make a decision and then you just close out and okay, we're moving on.
But a lot of times there are things that we have to make a decision about that are a lot more nuanced and complicated and amorphous and so what we'd start to doing is diverge meaning allowing space for people to have different ideas different perspectives and share everything that they want to share about what they feel, think, believe, and know of this decision that we're talking about.
Now. The biggest challenge is what happens when we let that keep going for a little bit is we start entering What's called the groan zone. This is where people's frustration start coming up. This is when people like why are we still talking about this? We need to move forward even though there are several people that aren't that there are several people who are not in agreement.
There are people like, why are we still talking about this? I still don't understand what you're saying. We're wasting time. We don't have enough time and getting just so frustrated angry confused and annoyed. That's actually part of the process and that's okay because we're allowing everyone to have the space and the communication about what is it that they know about the decision. And so sharing this with your team gives the team permission for that to happen.
It gives people a sense of certainty knowing that they're going to be in uncertainty. So this is just a normal part of the process and for you as a leader or as a team member can share your team. This is okay. This is all right for us to be in there and over time when people are because this allows for people to feel understood. What often happens is someone will talk about a decision that they want to make they'll hear one or two ideas and then shut everyone down. All right, we're done. Other people get frustrated because they have other opinions about this decision and they were not heard. Not even considered.
So this groan zone even though it's messy it allows everyone to feel really considered and allows us to get a broader understanding of what it is that we're talking about. And eventually we start coming to the convergence on this is where ideas can start coming together. This is where everyone is really understood. And so now we can start taking what all the elements are in putting into an idea of how we want to actually execute and what the final decision is and then we can close it up.
So even though people may not agree with your decision. Well, they're going to get behind it because not only did they feel heard which everyone wants but I think the deeper element is that they were considered not just heard but actually considered it's kind of the idea of diversity and inclusion you included them in the process and so they might not agree but there's a stronger likelihood that they will support the decision even if they don't agree. A
nd so you can have a team culture like that, even if right now, it doesn't feel like that you can start shifting your team culture. I hope this was really helpful for you. Thank you so much for listening in on this and if you want to learn more about team culture, you can visit our website at lead by impact.com. Thank you so much.