Participatory systems, teamwork, leadership, empowerment, and in general all the new trends in management, seem to point to consensus as a means of ensuring the best efficiency in the application of the decisions taken. It is a kind of management by consensus. During the meetings, tools and procedures are even used to facilitate or accelerate consensus. But beware: experts warn that there are times when this effort leads to mediocrity. Do not forget that the objective is to reach the best decision with the greatest conviction. Leaders must ensure that this is the case, and must energize - or synergize - their followers for the pursuit of their intended ends.
The meetings
The usefulness of business meetings is frequently questioned. Although they do not usually confess it openly, they do so in circles of trust: managers sometimes attend meetings that are unproductive, unnecessary, tumultuous, or because it is difficult to agree on the actions to be taken. Some of these meetings between managers, or of these with their close collaborators, are scheduled periodically, with or without a specific agenda, to advance in the alignment of efforts and also for the sake of better internal communication. Nor do ordinary workers seem to be very convinced of the efficiency of all their group work sessions, in which conclusions are sometimes reached not so much by consensus, as by tiredness, by boredom, or by mere obedience to the superior.
Let us say, however, that most of the meetings held in companies are surely fruitful or at least unavoidable; but it was traditionally accepted that, in general, meetings were a bit abused. Of course, those meetings are mainly questioned in which the convener, very confident of his authority, maintains a public dialogue with each of his summoned, while the others wait their turn with resignation and stoicism. This may be necessary - it really depends on the convener's management style - but it has been argued by the sufferers that they would prefer to have more solo offices with their bosses -face to face meetings- and fewer general meetings.
Team work
Many of the meetings held in companies are developed with full interactivity, handling arguments of reason, with freedom of expression, and following the rules of effective meetings. They are obvious demands of teamwork. The highly postulated teamwork has, by the way, brought very diverse experiences in this decade. The different formulas (managerial task forces, process improvement teams, self-directed teams, project teams, problem-solving teams, formal or organic teams, kaizen teams…) have certainly yielded very uneven results, the analysis of which is complex. Along with encouraging achievements, there have also been unsuccessful efforts.
In the beginning, in a good percentage of cases, they simply wanted to put teamwork into operation: for example, "that more than 50% of the workforce participate in teams." It was a matter of getting used to working in groups, organizations that until then had been moved almost exclusively by individual objectives, and that for that reason often suffered from undesirable internal conflicts. In your aspiration to achieve your goals, you did not realize, or did not want to warn, if you were jeopardizing other equally legitimate goals within the organization. Team spirit was missing.
All this of the team spirit in the companies, has been improving with the filming; but there is a common denominator in these initiatives that moves us to formulate these paragraphs: the search for consensus. In this regard - whether it is meetings of the Steering Committee, as if it is meetings between workers to improve processes - important risks continue to be run; experts say easy consensus can lead to mediocrity. And it is also said that, when this occurs, leadership has failed; but surely more things fail.
In search of consensus
Focusing only on the meetings that are convened with the intention of agreeing on the most appropriate action plans, it would still be necessary to distinguish between those in which the convener already attends the meeting with the decided conclusions, and those in which there is sufficient margin to the exchange of points of view and the enrichment of the analysis. In reality, the distinction refers rather to the circumstance that one or more of the participants have much more authority and power than the rest and display it with a certain-visible or subtle-ostentation. When the meeting takes place in a horizontal plane, it is possible to reach a consensus that is not false. But even assuming the consensus reached is real, it may have cost too much effort (many lengthy meetings),or it could be one of those that we said lead to mediocrity.
Among the tools or methods that facilitate consensus, one has become very widespread in recent years whose visible mechanics consists of the individual formulation of ideas on cards or cards of the appropriate size, the following grouping of these cards by affinity, and the subsequent « vote »of the groups or families obtained. The process is conducted by a kind of moderator or consensus builder that ensures the operation of the method. The systematics does nothing but tune the mental processes of analysis and synthesis of the participants, in order to avoid the unwanted prolongation of these meetings. Judging from the success of this method, it is conceivable that it can be effectively useful… if it is not distorted, adulterated or trivialized.
After the experiences we have attended, as a moderator or as a participant, we would recommend without reservation the knowledge and use of this consensus acceleration system; but we would warn about the importance of properly selecting the participating groups. We had access to the results of a session in which it was intended to identify the possible objections that users (technicians and graduates of large and medium-sized companies) would formulate before a new line of products that was innovative. Among the foreseeable objections that the participants selected for the brainstorming formulated when filling in their files, the following were read: "This is a bummer", "I hate computers", "The good thing is sports", "With the job I have, and then more PC »,« This is for fools »… It does not seem, with these contributions,That the group selected for this exercise knew in detail the product / service that your company wanted to launch on the market.
The previous anecdote insists that, if it is already true that we must be careful with false consensuses, and with decaffeinated consensuses leading to an uncertain future, we must also be very careful in the correct application of the methods or tools to use. Faced with so much necessary care, one can only look at someone who knows well where the north is: the leader.
Leadership and consensus
Seneca used to say that one should not limit ourselves to calculating opinions; they had to be weighed. Remember that we are not talking about democracy but about decision-making in the company, so that no one will be thinking of a general director, or a division head, or a middle command, who is limited to adding votes and defending the majority obtained. The leader we postulate (that is, who is postulated in the management treatises) will have to consider all the contributions of his team, measure the implications of the different alternatives, bet on one of them, and explain well why. Consensus is not, therefore, the triumph of the majority, but the triumph of the best option, once all the considerations have been considered.
It seems that the most successful leaders (based on the much available management literature) spend about 40% of their time explaining themselves. They are a kind of leaders-teachers who, having listened (here is another fundamental quality: knowing how to listen) to their collaborators, are able to convince them of what to do. And immediately, if that is the case, energize the organization to do so. They do not sin from panfilism, nor from complacency, nor from cowardice: they have an edge.
Ultimately, a good leader dedicates just enough time to consensus, because he wants consensus; but it is not subordinate to it. This should not mean that you despise the emotional attachment of your employees and subordinates, because this attachment is also part of the concept of leadership.
