Leading Teams: Facilitating Team Decision-Making
Yesterday’s leaders told others what to do. Today’s leaders listen for others to tell them what should be done. In other words, the most influential leaders need to become facilitators, able to draw out ideas and expertise from others.
Leaders who are able to facilitate make better decisions, increase team accountability, implement sustainable change initiatives, have more time overall and achieve better results.
How Groups Make Decisions
Let’s start by understanding how groups make decisions. The Kaner Model of Diverge/Converge, featured in the book Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making, looks at how groups make decisions through three key stages: open, refine and close. Facilitators use this model to think about the group facilitation process.
We start with an opening phase. This is where brainstorming happens; we gather as many ideas as possible. At this point, it is essential to remain as open as possible; all ideas are accepted, brainstorming is freewheeling and free of criticism, and individuals build on the ideas of others.
TRY THIS: BRAINSTORMING TEAM NORMS
With a group of five to 10 team members, invite them to come up with team norms that will help them work better together. This is an ideal activity for a team in the forming stage. For more, check out our Meeting Teams Where They Are [LINK] blog.
Open a MURAL board or Google Document (or if you’re in-person, use paper and sticky notes) and ask the following questions. Continue to ask, “and what else?” until all ideas have been expressed. For other meetings, take time to come up with a set of one to five questions to help with brainstorming. Our “Listening to Others” blog has great tips on asking powerful questions.
What are some ways we could improve our team decision-making?
What behaviors will help us work well together?
What are our meeting protocols, and how will we communicate between meetings?
What will be done when conflict occurs?
Want a template for this conversation? Grab this PowerPoint template and either print on large paper for in-person meetings or screen share for online meetings.
Groups then move on to a stage of refining, also sometimes known as the “groan zone.” This is when we start to look for patterns in the ideas, come up with decision-making criteria and choose a method by which the group will make decisions.
TRY THIS: REFINING IDEAS
After you have done the initial brainstorming, ask if anyone needs clarification about the ideas. Then group similar ideas together and create theme clusters. Sometimes, this process is done most effectively and succinctly in silence, with discussion only occurring when disagreements or confusion occurs. In an online meeting, you’ll notice a sticky note moving back and forth, which is a cue to ask, “What’s going on here?”
Once clusters are formed, name the groups based on common subjects and/or create categories.
Pick out your decision criteria (difficulty, cost, resources, etc.) and prepare to make your decision. A simple way to come up with decision-making criteria is to host a dot vote and allow participants to select the ideas most important to them. The easiest way to host a dot vote is to divide the number of ideas by three and give participants that many dots to vote. For online meetings, use an electronic voting feature, a program such as Menti.com, or simply adding initials or a symbol next to the ideas. There are more robust decision-making modalities; however, dot voting is ideal for new facilitators.
This brings us to the final stage of closing or converging on a decision. After the dot vote, create a list of next steps and ensure that everyone is clear about who owns them and any expected deadlines.
Make sure it is clear early on in the meeting how the decision will ultimately be made and who will be making it. For example, many leaders are simply “consulting” their teams for input but will make the final decision after the meeting. In other circumstances, whatever the team decides in the “co-creative” process is what goes. Being clear is important for setting expectations and building trust and transparency with the team.
If you’ve already made a decision, do not facilitate a collaborative decision-making meeting. Bringing a group together after a decision has already been made can erode trust. It would be better to simply “tell” (direct) or “sell” (direct and invite feedback) the decision you have made.
Utilizing Individual Preferences
Individuals will likely have preferences for one or more parts of the process. We often draw a simple version of open, refine, close when we start a meeting and let people know that they may find they have more energy for one part of the meeting than another.
Some may love the brainstorming process but feel apathetic toward the final decision. In contrast, others may not have the energy for brainstorming and most enjoy moving forward after a decision.
For “closers,” it can be challenging to work in the “open” space and not criticize ideas to encourage a quicker decision. For “openers,” coming to a final decision might feel very restrictive. Invite team members to notice whether or not they have preferences for “opening” or “closing,” and ask them to “wear the appropriate hat” when you come to a given stage, even if it isn’t their preference.
Others who love picking out patterns and finding themes may work best in the “groan zone,” and if theming/clustering isn’t your strength as a facilitator, ask for someone in the meeting who thrives in this area to help out.
Key Takeaways:
In the opening, allow space for all ideas to be shared. You’ll know people have finished when the ideas start to slow down. As much as it is possible, do not rush this process.
The clarifying, clustering and dot-voting of the “groan zone” can take time and may require more than one meeting, especially when happening online. You may decide to have separate sessions for each step of the process.
Lastly, use converging to make your final decision based on the criteria you picked out during refinement. Communicate who is making the final decision early on, and be ready to share the next steps with everyone involved and affected.
TRY THIS: Design a Difficult Decision Conversation (30 MINS)
Choose a difficult decision that needs to be made by a team you lead or are on. If you’re not sure or don’t have one, develop team norms using one or more of the following prompts:
Behaviors that will help us work together
Protocol for team meetings (frequency, vehicle, etc.)
How we will communicate between meetings to stay aligned
Steps to take when conflict occurs
How to ensure everyone's ideas are heard
How we will "team" for success (i.e., leads and backups)
Frame the conversation. At the start, establish the topic, what questions need to be asked or what decisions need to be made, and explain how the final decision will be made and by whom.
For each question, create a space to generate and refine ideas. Group similar ideas together, identify themes, add labels, etc.
Choose the best way to make the decision based on your group and circumstance. Ask yourself, “is a simple vote enough, or are there decision criteria that need to be weighed?”
To get you started, we’ve created a Google Doc template for you to copy and use. If you’re nervous or unsure about facilitating, script out your questions and talking points ahead of time. Think about challenges that may arise and how you will approach them.
Our Introduction to Facilitating with Visuals Course includes a module on designing and facilitating with visual templates. We include facilitation guide templates to help you develop your approach for success.
This article may contain affiliate and/or compensated links. For more information, please read our disclosure here.
If you enjoyed this article, please subscribe to our blog to receive email notifications whenever we post.
This blog is part of a series — 10 Steps to Grow Yourself as a Leader:
