Find out more about building consensus with your team!
Hephzibah Children’s Association in suburban Chicago set up a temporary home program for traumatized teenagers. In the beginning, the kids acted out more than expected. The director, Marianne, consulted friends who had successfully adopted six children. She and her staff use this information to work with the program kids. Together they and the kids came to a consensus on 8 rules for the program. The rules supplied structure. The teen’s behavior improved markedly.
Often, work teams include members that act like out-of-control teenagers. Team rules or consensus can provide them with structure that they need, and in fact are asking for.
Consensus is often an effective team building tool. We may call it by other names: agreements, contracts, rules, or norms. It can be achieved in unusual ways.
Remember when you were a part of a team that set up rules to stop some kind of “storming” behavior. It could be a work team, community team, or even in a family. If done well, it helped everyone on the team work effectively. You might ask yourself about that team:
- What created the environment that allowed the team to achieve consensus?
- How did the team set up a way for arriving at consensus?
Now that you are team leader:
- Are you clear about what the team goal should be that you want the team to reach a consensus on?
- Are you sharing with the team all the information that could help them reach an agreement?
You might have your own unique way of asking the team the following questions.
- What is our goal in making this decision, or deciding this policy? (In other words, why are we doing what we are doing?)
- What criteria should we use to decide whether our action is sound or not?
By helping achieve agreement among team members concerning goals and criteria, you are creating a structure in which consensus can take place. There are a variety of ways to explore an issue. Your team can set up its own method. You may want to conduct an open discussion about the pros and cons of proposals or set up subgroups to investigate issues and deliver reports. As a team, agree to a problem-solving or decision-making method, and then follow the procedures that you have set up.
QUESTION
How might you customize these ideas to ensure a workable consensus making for your team?
Chuck Scharenberg is the Founder of More Profit More Freedom, a consultancy that supports the execution of large-scale growth for small businesses. His practice has successfully grown businesses with processes that identify potential roadblocks and mitigation schemes to accelerate realistic execution.