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Group Decision Making
Career success depends on both results and relationships. Our free coaching tips can help you communicate with colleagues, resolve work conflicts, and build stronger teams.
GROUP DECISION MAKING TOPICS
Decision-making is an important function of many groups, especially project teams and management teams. Setting ground rules about how decisions will be made is a good idea, since otherwise groups may develop some bad decision-making habits.
Groups also need to differentiate between major and minor decisions. Taking half an hour to reach consensus on the color of program folders is probably a waste of effort, but reaching consensus on the approach to a major project is well worth the investment of time.
For a team to succeed, members need to play the appropriate role at the appropriate time. See which roles you are most likely to take and which ones are not part of your natural style. When you are on a team, try to use your strengths in a way that will help your group be productive.
Some groups are tough to manage. When members have conflicting interests, personal agendas, or aggressive personalities, meetings can deteriorate into pointless debates or angry conflicts, thereby wasting time and harming relationships.
When you ask people to describe the experience of working in teams, they often use words like “frustrating”, “disappointing”, and “waste of time”. But on the other hand, when you ask them to identify peak experiences at work, people frequently cite times when they worked with a group to accomplish a particularly challenging task. So what makes the difference? How can you tell whether a team will produce outstanding results or flame out completely? Here are a few signs that a group may be doomed to fail.
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