Are CEOs, senior executives, business owners, and managers of all stripes seeking consensus too often?

The demise of top down, arrogant, autocratic management is cause for celebration. Many executives and managers have seen the light and now treat their employees with more respect. They have come to realize that employees with differing expertise, experience, and positions within the company can provide valuable and varied input and ideas that facilitate problem solving, improve decisions, lead to more sustainable improvements, and save time. Furthermore, they now belief  involving employees in the organization’s challenges doesn’t just enhance that one particular situation, it also energizes employees, stimulates good ideas, improves employee judgment, and saves time throughout the organization on a daily basis. They also realize there is no shame in not having all the answers themselves and real danger in making important decisions without getting critical input from others. While some old school managers still adhere to the old top down practices, despite fleeing employees, many executives are now proud of having evolved to being consensus driven and they now do everything by consensus. And that is where the problem lies. The pendulum has swung too far in many companies. 

I encounter executives and managers daily who no longer seem able to make a decision by themselves. I see CEOs take a decision first to one group, then another, and maybe more. The decision drags out for months. The process resembles a fishing expedition, casting here and there, motoring around to different corners of the lake. The result is similar too: another day gone.

In a wandering, consensus-seeking process, decisions are rerouted or derailed entirely for all the wrong reasons and tremendous time is wasted with the involvement of so many people in countless, endless meetings.

There is a huge difference between appreciating the value of achieving consensus and doing everything by consensus. Being consensus driven is the opposite, and equally extreme, position to being autocratic. Both are wasteful and problematic in any organization. A consensus driven manager takes pride in gathering people and running meetings, but they likely spend more money evaluating a purchase than the purchase price, more time talking about an option than it would take to just try it, more anxiety hoping to pave the way for a change than it would take to deal with the consequences.

Don’t think about being autocratic versus consensus driven. This is not a personal style issue. There are times when managers should be autocratic, make a decision, and get on with things, and there are times when managers should delegate the entire decision to a group and get out of the picture completely. In between, there are countless variations. The point is to choose one that best fits the circumstances.

In making that choice, there are five factors to consider.

Time Available
If the window of opportunity is short, a quick decision is essential. Sometimes it is more important to act than to wait for more information. For example, when a customer complains, the organization that can address the concern on the spot, makes the customer happiest. Or perhaps an opportunity pops up that requires an immediate response. He who deliberates loses. You may wish you could get more input but collecting information takes time.

Ask yourself how the passage of time affects the situation and be sure you decide as quickly as needed.

Significance of the Decision
The most important decisions deserve the best resources, the most rigorous process, and adequate time. You don’t want to devote more resources than the decision warrants. You don’t want expensive resources making trivial decisions. You don’t want large groups leaving more important work to make decisions of limited consequence. And, even on an important decision, you don’t want to devote resources to debating options A and B if the differences are inconsequential.

Ask yourself how much money it makes sense to devote to the decision and then figure out how to best allocate those resources. A thorough understanding of the steps of the decision process will help you choose and allocate your resources effectively.

Knowledge
If you don’t possess the knowledge needed to make a decision, you have no choice but to get input from others or live with the consequences. This is where the arrogance of autocrats leads to stupid decisions. They make decisions they know nothing about. This is where the consensus driven managers waste time and money; they often fish for more opinions without thinking through the best way to identify and collect the most important knowledge and opinions. You will never have all the knowledge you need because their will always be unknowns.

Ask yourself who can best shed light on the most important aspects of the decision and involve those people. Just keep in mind the investment you decided was appropriate for the decision.

Need for Commitment
Employees usually accept decisions, whether they agree with them or not, if they believe the decision process was fair and informed. To be seen as fair, a decision requires honest, open, and reasonable objectives and deciders who are dedicated to those objectives. To be seen as informed, the deciders must take into consideration important factors such as the impact on those affected by the decision.

This does not mean every affected employee needs to be involved, but it does mean they need to believe their interests were well represented. Furthermore, it does not mean that everyone involved in a decision must be involved in every step of the decision. For example, senior management may decide to cut budgets without input, but when it comes to where specific cuts should be made, others need to be involved.

Ask yourself who will be impacted, how they will be impacted, where their input is most critical, and how you can obtain it. The biggest impact often involves implementation and can be easily obtained with focused discussions.

Employee Development
Involving employees in decisions is a great way to develop their skills and understanding of the business. Furthermore, it can pave the way to delegating decisions entirely, which helps move them lower in the organization where they likely belong.

This may sound like an invitation to involve everyone in every decision but that would be at the expense of everything else they are supposed to be doing. Ask yourself where it makes sense to invest in training because that is what you would be doing.

However, if you want to teach employees to become better decision-makers, be sure you model good decision-making yourself. This is particularly important with group decisions. There is no point in teaching employees how to flounder through decisions.

If you have gotten in the habit of making all decisions by consensus, it is time to step back and consider the cost each time you hem and haw and assemble a group for a series of meetings.