Adam, a project team leader we’ve known for years, is so concerned with being clear about the decision style his Six Sigma team will be using for different issues that he makes a chart. This allows the team to see which decisions he intends to make himself, which will be delegated, which will be consultative and who will be consulted, and which need to be made by the group. He uses the Checklist: Selecting a Decision-Making Approach with the group and records each team member’s preferences for the approach to a particular decision item.
Adam started this practice after a number of difficult project meetings in which nothing seemed to be getting done. Finally, his team decided to enlighten him on why things were getting stalled, and told him that he wasn’t listening to them. Adam was flabbergasted. He had always prided himself on listening carefully to the evidence presented before making a decision.
The problem was, Adam was making consultative decisions (listening to each argument, then making the decision himself) while his team thought they were making consensus decisions. (Please see Notes: Making Project Team Decisions Through Consensus.) As a result, the team was confused about what had been decided vs. what was still under discussion, and they began to get annoyed about what appeared to be Adam’s high-handed attitude.
After giving Adam feedback on his decision-making approach, the team went through the checklists for some of their pending and recent decisions. As it turned out, a consultative style was perfectly appropriate for most of the decisions Adam was making, and the team was happy to operate that way once the decision-making strategy was clear. Adam’s approach allowed the team to spend less time on less critical decisions, and reinforced the importance of allowing lots of time for those decisions for which a true consensus was needed.