The continuum of leadership behavior provides one context for understanding the best time and place for individual decisions versus group decisions. That continuum, as illustrated below, ranges from the completely subordinate-centered approach to the completely leader-centered approach. In between these extremes are another four types that blend or offset the “center” perspective.

Range of Meeting Leadership Styles

Both approaches can provide value, while specific advantages depend on some of the factors discussed below. Frequently, the advantages of group decision-making include:

1. Improved quality of decisions, proven over and over because of contributing factors such as . . .
   • Ability to generate more ideas and options
   • Self-monitoring that forces participants to keep each other honest
   • Fewer errors in using information that is available
   • Availability of more information
   • Reduction of potential individual bias
   • Willingness to manage higher levels of risk
2. Increases ownership through higher levels of understanding, acceptance, and likelihood to make necessary adaptations during implementation.
3. Participating individuals are strengthened, learn more, and can more readily re-apply the same rationale when they are making subsequent individual decisions.

Downside of Group Decision-making

There are some downside considerations as well including:

1. Potential to take more time
2. May create or heighten expectations, perhaps making them unobtainable
3. Could be at variance with management or senior staff
4. Quality of the output or decision might be hampered if the group is dominated by an individual(s), submits to forced selection or voting (leading to “losers” and consequent abandonment of ownership), or congeals into what Janis (1972) describes as “Groupthink.”

Groupthink describes a state or condition when the group regresses into poor thinking and social pressures. Janis claims that three factors increase the likelihood of groupthink, namely: insulation from qualified outsiders, leaders who promote their favorite position, and strong cohesion. You may be witnessing groupthink if you observe some of the following symptoms:

• Excessive optimism and illusion of invulnerability
• Tendency to dismiss contrary points of view accompanied by collective efforts to rationalize their own position or discount the positions of others
• Unquestioned beliefs in the group’s supposed moral superiority and ignoring the consequences of their decision(s)
• Prejudicial comments and stereotyping outsiders not in the meeting
• Audible and non-verbal pressure on participants to conform
• Censorship of deviations from what has congealed to be ‘consensus’

Research shows, however, that decision-making by consensus tends to result in higher quality decisions than command control, manipulation, persuasion, voting, and other means of compromise.

What is Consensus?

Consensus must be carefully defined. A robust method will make full use of all the resources in the group, can be relied on for acceptable ways to reconcile conflict, and will generate the ownership a group needs to ensure that what goes on in the meeting is carried out after the meeting has concluded. We highly recommend that ‘consensus’ DOES NOT mean we are making everyone happy. Rather, we are striving for a common acceptance and level of understanding that would include ‘yes’ answers by all participants to the following questions:

1. Can you live with this (decision/ plan/ output/ outcome, etc.)?
2. Will you support it professionally and not subvert it when the meeting concludes?
3. Will you personally lose any sleep over it?

Resulting in Synergy

We could define synergy as the increased effectiveness of working together where the outcome becomes greater than the sum of the parts. We are seeking an answer that did not walk into the meeting, rather it can be created during the meeting. For a meeting with nine people, for example, we are looking for the tenth answer. Synergy frequently results among groups that are seeking consensus, built around a common goal. When supported by strong facilitation, participants agree on a clear and common goal (typically the meeting deliverable), share openly, listen carefully, and think clearly, and they are likely to achieve synergy.

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Don’t ruin your career by hosting bad meetings. Sign up for a workshop or send this to someone who should. MGRUSH workshops focus on meeting design and practice. Each person practices tools, methods, and activities every day during the week. Therefore, while some call this immersion, we call it the road to building high-value facilitation skills.

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Facilitation Expert

Terrence Metz, MBA, CSM, CSPF, PSP01, HTTO1, is the Managing Director of MG RUSH Facilitation Leadership, Training, and Meeting Design, an acknowledged leader in structured facilitation training, and author of “Meetings That Get Results – A Facilitator’s Guide to Building Better Meetings.” His FAST Facilitation Best Practices blog features nearly 300 articles on facilitation skills and tools aimed at helping others lead meetings that produce clear and actionable results. His clients include Agilists, Scrum teams, program and project managers, senior officers, and the business analyst community among numerous private and public companies and global corporations. As an undergraduate of Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) and an MBA graduate from NWU’s Kellogg School of Management, his professional experience has focused on process improvement and product development. He continually aspires to make it easier for others to succeed.