Consensus gets you stuck
Many organisations have figured out that the top-down, command-and-control style of management is not productive.
It's not just that it's not good for people.
It is not good for the quality of the work.
Here's why: It is often the more junior people in your organisation who are most frequently in contact with your customers. They are the ones who are observing them first hand. They know not just what clients are saying, but how they are saying it. Not just the problems they are facing, but how they are trying to solve them. Your junior staff are a source of rich data. When the privileged flow of will (AKA 'decision making') is only from "the top" - that rich data, which is essential to refining your understanding of impact and value, gets lost.
Many leaders are aware of this, and want to cultivate a more democratic, more participatory culture. One where the decision-making bandwidth of the organisation is not fiercely concentrated in one place1. And one where a group's collective knowledge and skills are more fully brought to bear.
This is laudable and I encourage it - but there is a massive trap waiting on this path.
Having rejected a purely hierarchical model, many organisations get drawn into making decisions by consensus. And unfortunately, however positive the intention that lead you there, a consensus approach breeds dysfunction.
The biggest problem with consensus is that it generates stuckness by the bucketload.
When decisions are made by consensus, everyone has to agree before a decision can be reached. It therefore takes only one person's opposition to bring any initiative to a halt. Given how easy it is to manufacture doubt, the natural outcome of a consensus approach is that things do not happen. It is hard to get things done, which is the opposite of a high-performance culture.
In a meeting built on consensus one person being slightly less enthusiastic can lead to a chain reaction, and before you know it the group has talked itself out of doing something.
Or there can be a pattern like this:
long discussion coming to an end
decision seems to become clear
someone moves to bring things to an explicit conclusion
since the whole group is the decision maker, they have to turn to everyone
even though they may all approve, nobody knows if they have the authority to speak
each person is looking for authorisation 'from the group'
silence spreads
decision stalls
These tend to be quite unpleasant situations to be in. Even just describing this fictional example sets me on edge. I am not the only one that dislikes these kinds of dynamics. This is not the positive experience we were hoping to bring when we tried to do away with our "do as I say because I’m the boss" dynamic.
So what can you do to avoid this trap?
The solution is to define a clear source of authority that is not the whole group. Think about who can say 'yes' to certain kinds of decisions. Are there particular roles in your organisation that would logically hold decision-making power over particular issues? This does not have to be the most 'senior' person, and it certainly doesn't always have to be the CEO.
Taking steps to formalise who can make decisions about what can be a big step forward towards a higher performing organisation.2
Next week I will talk more about an alternative and dynamic model of participatory decision making.
This is a classic recipe for founder burnout - problem #4 on my list of classic growing pains for organisations.
Notice that in many organisations, this is one of the functions of an org chart. But an org chart also encodes other information too, like formal relationships. Decision-making authority and manager/report relationships do not need to coincide!