How Can I Work With a Group to Reach Consensus on an Issue?
The group’s chair or leader has to have the facilitating skills to allow members to tear apart and put back together each and every idea on the flipchart. With each idea, the group needs to try to achieve consensus. When doubts aren’t voiced, the facilitator should be observant enough to see nonverbal cues that suggest some members don’t agree.
Since this can be a time-consuming process, and an idea may never get the unanimity that the process is expected to generate, some managers have incorporated a weighted vote at the near end of the process whereby the best ideas are voted on. Slowly ideas are crossed out until only two or three ideas remain. A final vote is used to choose the idea to be pursued.
Despite the effort that goes into consensus decision making, many members of a group come out of the process as disappointed as they might have been had the final decision been made by the team chair. Consensus decision making works only if these three considerations have been met:
- Each member must feel he or she has been heard and understood by the rest of the team.
- Each member must be able to live with the decision or solution.
- Each member must be willing to pull his or her weight in making the final idea a reality.
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Some individuals on the team may feel nonetheless that the wrong decision is being made. If pressure is exerted on them to give in and vote in favor of an idea, the facilitator must step in. There should be no politicking to force participants to vote one way or another. If the participants aren’t happy with the conclusion reached, the team chair can offer the nay-sayers other options. For instance, they can add to the minutes their own dissenting viewpoint. Or they can add a trial period for testing the decision. If the pilot project doesn’t work, they may want to go back into committee to rediscuss the conclusion reached.
They can also step aside, refusing to participate in implementation of the idea if they so wish.