The Consensus-Based Decision-Making Style

Learn about the consensus-based decision-making style and the situations when it’s most appropriate.

The fourth style of decision-making is consensus-based decision-making. This is when decisions are reached with a cross-functional team. People from different departments are having their input, and buy-in is essential. You should reserve this style of decision-making for the biggest decisions you’re trying to make. However, recognize this can take a lot of time. You have to get everybody saying yes before the decision is made. You’re going to have individuals from multiple groups, multiple functions, all working together, coming up with that final perspective for the final decision. And performance of the individuals is measured by the team’s outcomes since everyone is involved in making the call.

Allow me to offer an example. At one point, we were launching a brand new website for our company. This was a major investment for the organization, and we needed to make sure we got it right. There was no urgency around making this call, and we knew there would be a lot of meetings and analysis that needed to be done. Ultimately, we needed agreement before we turned that website on. We needed to make sure that finance, IT, marketing, sales, operations, and customer service were all on board with that decision. Needless to say, the steering committee’s job of getting all those people together and driving the input from those organizations was a monstrous task. But in the end, because we had taken our time and gotten everybody to give their input, we had buy-in on the final decision. When we executed it, it went very quickly and very well.

As you think about situations where you’re going to use a consensus-based approach to your decision-making, understand it will take a long time and you’re going to get input from a lot of different groups. But ultimately, you will have that buy-in when you say go.

Want to learn more about decision-making strategies? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start improving your decision-making strategies. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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