In a business environment, the most successful teams are the ones that have learned to work through problems and make decisions together. Decision-making can sometimes feel like a magical, mystical process, but it’s actually a science.
Empowering teams to make better decisions boosts employee engagement benefiting the organization significantly.
So how do you empower your team to make better decisions?
Define the problem, not the solution
The first step in making a decision or solving a problem is to define it. This first step is one of the most critical ones. You have to accurately and adequately define the constraints, the current operations, and the goals. If you spend the time upfront defining the requirements and constraints, you’ll be able to determine whether or not the solution you’re considering is the right one.
Make sure that you frame the issue correctly to make the challenge open ended. For e.g. if you ask the question like "Should we add a new step to our pipelines for security scanning?" will limit the discussions before it begins. Instead framing the question like "What steps or changes can be made to the release process to make our applications more secure?", will prevent steering the team towards a preconceived conclusion.
Encourage critical thinking
Being objective is a fundamental part of critical thinking. That means analyzing the problem without allowing personal bias, emotions or assumptions to influence how you think. A strong critical thinker will only analyze a problem based on the context and facts collected after conducting thorough and impartial research.
We’re all wired to follow the crowd, which often leads to flawed group decision-making. Social scientists have found that the first person to speak (or the first idea that gets early support) has a strong influence on group decisions because people tend to want to agree with each other. In other words, the first proposed solution may end up being chosen, even if it’s not the best.
To stop brainstorming from becoming groupthink, encourage group members to be open and honest, and to disagree with each other respectfully. Team leaders should model this behavior by asking probing questions of everyone, like “Tell me why you think that?” and “Can you share evidence to support that belief or hypothesis?”
Offer a shared vision
People feel empowered from the start of any project when you make the decision-making process collaborative. Don't relegate team members to perform specific tasks or only communicate certain components of information to various groups, without providing the big picture. This creates a very limiting, myopic view.
Workshops like big picture event storming will help your team get a shared and holistic view of the problem domain. With this shared vision, all stakeholders can be in synch and teams can deliver better results.
Reinforce positive behavior
When you let go of micromanaging and empower your team, honest mistakes are bound to happen. That’s OK. If mistakes happen, don’t punish employees. Make them teachable moments, with constructive feedback that helps employees understand what led to the mistake and how to avoid making it in the future.
Rewarding positive behavior can be far more effective than punishment. Positive reinforcement is an effective way of teaching and is a way to get those positive behaviors to be repeated. When you notice progress or a job well done, let your employees know. You can do this through:
• Verbal acknowledgement
• Written email
• Public recognition in front of the team
Democratic voting system
Sometimes the team reaches a unanimous state where after a discussion, everyone clearly sees one course of action as superior. This is the ideal situation where the team look around and realize that everyone is collectively on the same page. Everyone can easily get on board with the confidence that the final verdict was a pure team decision.
But sometimes, the team is divided into two or three alternative opinions, and then a democratic voting system can be adopted to reach an acceptable solution. The team can usually implement the team’s decision cooperatively after a democratic process, which is the major strength of this option.
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