4. Consensus building - A Decision making style

Decision making is another critical part of the role of a manager. The most sought of style of decision making in the 'Consensus' building. This style is used when everyone's involvement and proper support is required for the success of the implementation. A big consensus can be treated as composed of a series of little agreements.

 

There are a lot of advantages of Consensus Decision making:

• Full discussion (open communication) and hence discovery is enabled
• High quality decisions are arrived
• It is understood/supported by everyone and promotes fairness
• Non-ownership is avoided, so the decisions become self implementing and require little monitoring

Here are the ground rules of Consensus building:

1. Create an open and trusting climate: No fear of attack or ridicules
   
2. Explore differences of opinions: It helps is getting additional information, clarifications and seeking better alternatives. Group's final idea will be usually superior than the original idea.
3. Support one another's ideas.
4. Hold off judging ideas: Do not evaluate idea before it is presented and discussed.
5. Evaluate ideas objectively: See the merit of the idea without the bias for the presenter.
6. Avoid trying to 'Win': Let the discussion not become a personal contest.
7. Discuss till sufficient agreement exists: 100% agreement may not be realistic.
8. Do not opt for voting: It will split the group and make opposing camps.   

Fast Group Decision making:

1. Perform individual ranking without changing your mind based on other's input.
2. Use it for calculating the group ranking.
3. Get the expert ranking.
4. See the Group Score = Expert Ranking - Group Ranking. It will give you an idea on areas which may require some discussion.

Some of the disadvantages of Consensus Decision making are:

• It is time consuming
• It is frustrating for the SMEs (Subject matter experts)
• Some managers feel that it can be threatening to the 'Power Structure'
• Requires skills/trainings/discipline from the partcipants

The other styles of Decision making are:

1. Majority (Democratic Voting): May be used when decision would be impacting very large number of people which is too large for consensus building.
2. Autocratic: Crisis situation requiring urgent expert intervention.
3. Minority Rule: A minority of members make the decision and others are mostly quite.
4. Non-decision: This is situational where the cost of taking a decision is more than not taking a decision.