Consensus

Consensus

• Discuss a situation where you had to build consensus for a decision. In doing so, be sure to discuss: Whether the consensus ultimate or good enough

I have been in a situation that required us to build consensus for a decision. I was helping my team decide on a new and better process for planning and working. We needed to make the new process more structured. There was a need for a more rigorous process in working as a team because members realized that the previous processes did not yield satisfactory outcomes. I needed to research when consensus processes are appropriate and when they are not. In the process of developing new processes, I learned many important lessons concerning consensus and decision making. I learned that consensus is most appropriate when there is a significantly high level of support from members (Cabrerizo et al, 2014). It also requires a significant amount of time to conduct decision-making meetings. It is more appropriate where the person who comes up with the main idea does not have role power (Cabrerizo et al, 2014). Consensus is needed when team members are not sure about the person who should make important decisions. However, in most cases, decisions made based on consensus appear to be wrong for various reasons. Sometimes the complexity and cost of consensus may be too high for a team to manage (Innes, 2018). In such cases, people should consider choosing individuals and giving the role of making important decisions. Delegating the role of decision making should be one of the primary jobs of the manager (Innes, 2018). The stated factors make the consensus I was involved good enough as a learning point for my bid to become a successful team manager.

• How the process included multiple perspectives

The consensus process involved multiple perspectives. As a team leader, I tried to take a third person’s perspective as much as possible. I also tried to help members to do the same. I understood that whenever team members talked to each other about the issue at hand, they were sharing their perspectives (Zhang, Dong, & Herrera-Viedma, 2017). They were speaking in the first person, a factor which means that they were telling others exactly what they thought about the subject. Listeners had their perspectives about what they heard. They had a second perspective for that reason. As a team leader, I had a third perspective. I had the responsibility of thinking critically about the speaker’s message as well as thinking about the perceptions of the listeners about the same message.

• How the issues were kept separate from the personalities involved

We tried to keep the issues separate from the personalities involved. The team made the definition of success clear to all members from the beginning. We believed that some people would not be willing to participate in the consensus-building process. Such people believe that their interests will be better served by not supporting the corporate agreement (Innes, 2018). We ensured that all the decisions made by the team aimed at meeting the interests of the parties that did not support the agreement as well. That strategy helped prevent them from becoming barriers to the implementation of important agreements.

• How the solution affected the stakeholders

Most stakeholders were satisfied by the solution at least to some extent. Some were absent from the meeting but all the present members ensured that they included the perspectives of the absentees as well. As a team leader, I understood that the absent members had perspectives too. They had their own perspectives about what the speakers said and whet the listeners thought about the message. I understood that most stakeholders would share their first-person perspectives without caring about other people’s perceptions of the topic (Innes, 2018). I encouraged them to think in many perspectives for the team to achieve desired outcomes.

References

Cabrerizo, F. J., Ureña, R., Pedrycz, W., & Herrera-Viedma, E. (2014). Building consensus in group decision making with an allocation of information granularity. Fuzzy Sets and Systems, 255, 115-127.

Innes, J. (2018). Planning through consensus building: A new view of the comprehensive planning ideal. In Classic Readings in Urban Planning (pp. 147-161). Routledge.

Zhang, H., Dong, Y., & Herrera-Viedma, E. (2017). Consensus building for the heterogeneous large-scale GDM with individual concerns and satisfactions. IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, 26(2), 884-898.