A business leader’s life can be summarized in three words: decisions, decisions, decisions. The number of high-quality decisions you’re expected to make daily can be mind-boggling. But you can take solace in the fact that you don’t have to do it all alone.
Hiring the right people, expanding your business in a new market, or adding a new product line—important business decisions are typically the result of a focused team effort and effective business evaluation. 💪
However, a team can make good decisions only when leadership effectively facilitates open discussions and collaboration. There are processes in place to synthesize diverse perspectives, and there’s a culture of accountability to implement the decision.
That’s why team leaders must ensure they have the correct data, tools, and people to help them make quick, objective decisions.
In this post, we’ll cover how you can create the conditions for optimal team decision-making. We’ll also explore the process, its benefits and challenges, the different models used, and offer some pro tips.
How to Facilitate Strong Team Decision-Making
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhy Is Team Decision-Making Important?
According to a study by Zippia, 90% of employees believe decision-makers should not make a final decision without consulting their teams, but 40% feel that their leaders and decision-makers consistently fail to do so.
In many workplaces, managers and leaders assume it’s quicker and more efficient to make a decision alone or with a few hand-picked associates. To them, involving too many people is an unnecessarily complex endeavor that wastes time, adds minimal value, and delays problem-solving.
But this approach could be doing your business more harm than good.
Here’s why team decision-making is important for your organization:
Novel ideas
When your whole team—composed of people whose judgment you trust—works toward a shared goal, you can view a problem from multiple angles.
Each team member comes with a diverse background, experience, and skillset. They can bring unique perspectives to the table that you, alone, may not have considered. Multiple perspectives and viewpoints enable you to approach a challenge collectively and from all sides. And your final solution comes out to be holistic and inclusive.
The ideas that emerge from team collaboration and consensus building might be precisely what your business needs—a creative, original, multifaceted solution. Studies show that diversity leads to better decision-making and fuels organizational innovation.
Employee experience
Now more than ever, employees want to feel like their opinions and roles matter in the organization’s bigger picture.
The same study by Zippia reveals that companies that promote group collaboration and communication see employee turnover rates drop by a staggering 50%.
Involving your team in decision-making increases employee satisfaction and acceptance of the decision. It also lets them know you value them. Employees are, on average, 17% more satisfied with their job when they collaborate actively.
When you value the views of your employees, they feel an increased sense of loyalty and accountability toward your business. So, collaborative decision-making can help improve your effectiveness as a manager and leader.
Information sharing
Group conversations and discussions can give your employees important information about the organization’s direction.
It also allows leaders to identify areas of misunderstandings or confusion and quickly provide clarity. The result is increased alignment between your company’s strategic roadmap and employee buy-in. This creates a more harmonious workplace environment.
Bonus: Team Charter Templates!
Summarize this article for me pleaseUnderstanding the Team Decision-Making Process
Now that we’ve established the importance of making decisions as a team, how do we do it? To define a process that is both outcome-oriented and fast, here are the steps to follow:
1. Identify the problem
First, acknowledge and accept that there is an anomaly in the business or an objective you need to achieve. Evaluate your business to determine what’s going wrong or needs a decision.
Team members should be able to freely discuss and agree on the problem they are trying to solve. It prevents everyone from being pulled in different directions and saves valuable time.
2. Define the problem
Next, you need to build a clear picture of the issue. So start by collecting all the relevant information and encouraging your team to contribute.
In this step, you should ask specific questions such as: Who in the organization is most affected by the challenge? Who will be most impacted by a planned change? How did the issue arise? What is the scope of the issue?
Dive as deeply as you can to understand the situation. Get data to gain clarity and make sense of the problem. The more you know, the better you can plan your next steps. This will also help you avoid misdiagnosing the issue.
3. Build solutions
Once you have the complete picture, gather your team to brainstorm all plausible solutions. But before you do that, set clear parameters on how to measure the effectiveness of a solution.
These parameters could be a checklist, a list of yes/no questions, or a tangible increase/decrease in specific business metrics. Ensure you specify the conditions that must be satisfied by the solution or the decision.
Then, welcome the ideas that emerge from your team.
4. Evaluate all options
Now that you’ve laid out all the possible solutions in detail, it’s time to pick the best one.
Try to write down the real-world outcomes of each option. Evaluate the solution’s possible effect on your business, employees, customers, and other stakeholders, as well as the external environment. You can even create a mutually acceptable set of criteria and a scoring mechanism to guide your evaluation.
Of course, not everyone will agree on everything. Some team members will have to make compromises. That’s why it’s essential to remind folks that you’re trying to arrive at the ‘right’ decision, not the most ‘popular’ one.
5. Implement the solution and review the results
Once you reach a group consensus, you can finalize the plan. And then, of course, implement it.
But the process doesn’t end there. Once your solution is in action, you must monitor it and see whether it yields the desired results.
If your solution was not a total success, communicate this clearly to your team and see if you can make tweaks to improve it. Also, assess if there was a deviation from your plan.
If the solution does not work, revisit the options list and implement the next best solution. This step is critical for improving future decision-making processes.
6. Provide feedback
Every failure or victory is an opportunity to learn. After assessing the performance of your solution, make sure to share feedback with team members. Include details on how well your solution addressed the problem, how much of a positive impact it had, and how much time or effort it saved.
Also, evaluate the group decision-making process itself. What worked well, and what could be improved?
Encourage honest feedback from team members so they remain as engaged in the process as you are.
Use the insights gained through feedback to refine your team’s decision-making processes for tackling future challenges.
Summarize this article for me pleaseBenefits and Challenges of Team Decision-Making
If you’re still on the fence about collaboration for problem-solving, that’s understandable. To help you assimilate your thoughts, here’s a breakdown of its pros and cons:
Benefits
- Enhanced creativity: Collaborative decision-making fosters innovation by allowing every team member to build on each other’s ideas, exposing them to thinking styles and mental models different from their own. That’s why highly creative teams are often composed of a mixture of eclectic individuals
- Improved problem-solving: When teams pool their collective problem-solving skills, they can comprehensively analyze the issue and are more likely to find effective solutions. Moreover, if decisions are complex, allowing team members to share their perspectives and ideas can increase the critical evaluation needed to make high-quality decisions
- Increased trust and commitment: Team members involved in the decision-making process feel a greater sense of connection, belongingness, and loyalty to the organization. It also indicates that the organization trusts its employees to have the business’s best interest at heart.
This results in a higher level of commitment, ownership, and accountability among the team as well
Challenges
- Time sink: Group decision-making can be time-consuming. A recent McKinsey Global Survey revealed that only 20% of respondents felt their organizations excelled at decision-making. The majority said most time spent on decision-making is ineffective. While consensus building and considering multiple viewpoints takes time, it may not suit urgent decisions
- Conflict and disagreement: Differing opinions within a team can lead to conflicts, slowing the process down and potentially creating interpersonal tension between team members
- Groupthink: The desire for harmony within a team may lead to groupthink, where members conform to a unanimous decision without critically evaluating alternatives. This could result in suboptimal choices
- Coordination and communication issues: Effective communication and coordination among team members can be challenging, especially in large teams or those spread across different geographies. Cultural differences may also come into play here. All of these factors could lead to misunderstandings or missed opportunities
Summarize this article for me pleaseTypes of Team Decision-Making Models
As a team leader, you can have different styles of decision-making. Similarly, there are different models or approaches to making decisions as a team. Here are the six most popular ones.
- Consensus decision-making: In this approach, everyone can voice their ideas and opinions regarding an issue. Then, the team works together to choose which idea they find the most appropriate. Everyone has to vote for their favorite idea and reach a consensus on the solution before making the final decision
- Delphi technique: In this method, a team of experts is given a set of questions to answer. Their written answers are shared with the team, providing their written feedback. Based on the feedback, the team of experts can change or modify their answers through multiple rounds of back and forth until a consensus is reached
- Autocratic decision-making: In this technique, usually the group leader is the final decision maker regardless of whether the group supports their decision. Typically, the leader has the authority and tools to decide by themselves. This type of decision-making can be used to take action on urgent but low-impact matters
- Majority rules: This is the most common method used in group decision-making, where each member of the team votes for their choice. The option that gets the most votes wins. Although this technique seems fair, it might leave a minority group dissatisfied
- Nominal group technique: This is a structured brainstorming method used to generate ideas or solutions from a group. Participants independently generate ideas, which are then shared and collectively evaluated. By ranking and evaluating the ideas, the group works together to identify a list of the most promising solutions, leading to informed decision-making
- Multi-Voting: Each team member votes for multiple options from a list of choices. The ideas with the highest number of votes are then selected. This method helps prioritize ideas by allocating multiple votes to each participant, allowing for a fair distribution of preferences and identification of the most favored options based on the collective input
Summarize this article for me please6 Tips for Successful Team Decision-Making
We’ve established the process and the pros and cons of teamwork-based decision-making. Here are some pro tips to get it right.
1. Assign tasks
Ensure you’ve clearly explained and assigned tasks to everyone involved in the decision-making process. Invite any questions or doubts from the start because if your team members don’t understand the task well, they won’t be able to do it right. A well-organized team can collaborate better and progress faster.
Using a project management tool like ClickUp Tasks, you can simplify the task assignment process. It will help you assign tasks, create subtasks, and review the progress of each team member.
If you are finding it hard to manage and prioritize your tasks yourself, you can use ClickUp’s Task Management Template to visualize all the tasks your team is working on in a real-time dashboard.
With a ready-made template, you must add task details and let the platform do its magic.
The ClickUp platform has built-in tools to help you visualize and organize tasks by status, priority, or department, track and optimize workflows, and collaborate across teams to finish tasks.
You can view your timeline in a way that works for you—in a calendar, board, list, or box view.
And if you don’t find something you want on the template, you can add new Custom Fields for details like budgets, file attachments, feedback, etc.
2. Prioritize tasks
As each team member works toward a common goal, setting priorities can help create a smooth workflow. Get your team members to decide what tasks to tackle first for maximum impact.
ClickUp Task Priorities makes this process a breeze. Use the feature to assign each task a priority level. You have four options: Urgent, High, Normal, or Low. You can also set filters for due dates to mark task deadlines.
To keep everyone on the same page, drop the high-priority tasks in the task tray so they’re always in your view. You can see which pending tasks block other high-priority ones and course-correct as needed.
3. Brainstorm ideas
Brainstorming sessions allow your team members to collect their jumbled, scattered thoughts, assemble them before others, and tap into each other’s ideas and perspectives. If done right, these sessions can engender critical thinking and spark creativity.
If you need a dynamic workspace to share, visualize, and develop ideas collectively, use ClickUp’s Whiteboard feature. Encourage your team members to share their ideas on this digital canvas and collaborate visually with the rest of the team in real time.
The best part? You can even action these brainstorming sessions as soon as they’re concluded. Simply link your ClickUp Whiteboard to your ClickUp Tasks and give everyone the complete context of your project with linked files, documents, and more.
4. Meet with your team regularly
Transparent communication is critical for the success of any group exercise. Schedule regular meetings with your team, whether physically or virtually, right from the first step of decision-making till the last. This will help you strategize, plan better, and keep everyone in the loop on all developments.
It can be tricky to lead meetings, however. Especially with team members you haven’t worked with. As a leader, the onus is on you to break the ice. Once that’s done, you can easily steer the discussion in a productive, respectful, and engaging way.
Check out these simple yet effective ideas for your next productive team meeting.
5. Create a structured workflow
Assigning everyone their tasks and duties is essential. But then, you must create a structured workflow that details these tasks, duties, and interdependencies.
This is particularly important to visualize progress, identify and eliminate bottlenecks, and keep everyone on the same page in a large team. You can also set and achieve goals faster with a systematic, step-wise workflow.
To clarify planning and organizing tasks, check out the ClickUp Mind Maps feature. You can use it to create tasks, build connections within them, and organize your projects with drag-and-drop nodes. ClickUp Mind Maps come with two modes:
- In the Task mode, you can swiftly rearrange your workspace by drawing and organizing branches logically. You can also create, edit, and delete tasks directly from your mind map.
- In the Blank mode, generate free-form mind maps without linkages to any task structure. You can easily convert them into tasks in any list within your workspace.
ClickUp also provides AI tools and decision-making templates to fast-track your decision-making process without compromising the quality of decisions.
6. Review progress
Finally, when a decision is executed, take the time to debrief and decompress. Review project progress, analyze processes, and discuss drawbacks, unsolved problems, and decisions that pan out as planned.
But don’t forget to celebrate the things that went well. Acknowledge the efforts and wins of your team and build a workplace culture that rewards achievement.
Summarize this article for me pleaseTrack Key Decisions with Technology and Smart Work
Team decision-making is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. Everyone adds their unique piece, and the whole becomes so much greater than the sum of its parts. Collaborative solutions for teams can work wonders because they unlock fresh ideas, creative problem-solving, and a strong sense of solidarity and teamwork.
But sometimes, differing opinions can cause a little bump in the road. ClickUp’s all-in-one project management solution helps you overcome those bumps so you and your team can combine forces and reach your goals far more efficiently.
Try ClickUp today to foster collaborative decision-making and improve group dynamics in your organization.
Summarize this article for me pleaseCommon FAQs
1. Why should teams be involved in the decision-making process?
Teams bring diverse perspectives and ideas, leading to better decisions overall. Team-led decision-making also shows that you trust your employees, which leads to increased commitment and loyalty.
2. What are the different models of team decision-making?
Consensus decision-making, the Delphi technique, and autocratic decision-making are some of the most common models of team decision-making.
3. How can software tools like ClickUp enhance the team decision-making process?
ClickUp helps you streamline communication, organize and prioritize tasks, and facilitate team collaboration through features like whiteboards and mind maps. It helps improve efficiency and collaboration in decision-making.
Questions? Comments? Visit our Help Center for support.