5 Team Decision Making Behaviours to Adopt in Your Team

1. Develop a well-defined criteria

Before making any decision, the team must develop a set of criteria to determine whether the choice is a good one. One way to use this is to adopt the use of decision matrixes. The use of decision making matrices is a good evaluating tool that allows the team to score each decision option according to the criteria.

 2. Challenge all assumptions

Team members need to be skilled at distinguishing between things that people say that are truly facts and those that are assumptions. Question by asking “How do we know that?” or “Where are the evidence to support this theory?”. Challenging assumptions also force team members to explain and justify the rationale for their decisions. 

3. Encourage debate

It is important for the team to assign one or two members to play the role of “challenger” so that healthy debate exists for all available options before making a decision. Healthy debate and questioning goes a long way in ensuring that the proposal will be refined and reasonable and also stand up to scrutiny by upper management.

4. Have multiple alternatives

There is a need to generate at least 3 alternatives before making a decision. In the event that the first option has been found to be unsuccessful or unworkable, team members could go back to earlier options and evaluate them to get started again.

 5. Ensure a fair process

People are concerned with the outcome, that is, the eventual decision, but they are more concerned with the process that led to the decision. There is research to show that even when their preferred choice or preferred decision is not selected as the final decision, they will support it as long as it has been derived from a fair process.