When to Make Participatory Decisions

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

The second style of decision you can make is participatory. And this is where you’re going to make a decision with input from the people who are going to be impacted in that final call.

Now remember, participatory decisions are made when the decision is much bigger, there’s a lot more risk involved. So getting that additional information from more people is going to reduce that decision-making risk. Also, by getting that buy-in, you’re reducing execution risk because people have had an opportunity to give their input and have a say in the final call that’s made.

Now as far as that final call in participatory decision-making, there’s still that smaller decision making authority. It may be an individual or a smaller group. So that aspect of it can feel a little autocratic, but we’ve gotten input along the way. And those individuals are going to interact with each other as this decision is being made. So getting all the people in the room so they can hear each other’s perspectives is going to help you drive to a better decision.

Allow me to offer an example. Recently in my firm, we looked at raising prices on some of the services that we offer. Now this is a really big decision and it has a huge impact on the financials of my firm. So I couldn’t rush off and just make an autocratic decision without getting input from the other people I work with.

So we sat down, we had a conversation, we weighed the pros and cons. People had their say, they brought up things that I hadn’t thought of. And we highlighted some risks that we were going to have to mitigate along the way. Now, ultimately as the leader of the firm, I had to make that call. But I got the input from the people who are going to be involved in executing the decision so we get better execution on the back end.

So as you think about making decisions in a participatory environment, remember you should be using this style where the decisions are bigger, you have a little bit more time to make it because you need to gather more input along the way which takes time and takes meetings. But ultimately, that smaller decision-making body is going to make the call.

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