Affairs Between Consensus & Decision

In every group, sooner or later, a decision making apparatus must be agreed upon. Whether it be consensus, majority rule, unanimity, or any other method, there must be some modus operandi for the groups to make decision. By consensus, I mean here that every one in the group, regardless of whether or not he individually agrees with it, understands and feels that others understand him. Ordinarily, if the group does not have consensus and a decision goes through, the group pays. For instance : 

Five steps to avoid "whose job is this?" situation.

Post written by Anshul Gupta. Follow me on twitter.

Well…there are a few lessons that we all have learnt during the course of our lives. And one of them can be explained beautifully using a story:

This is a story of four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody.

There was an important job to be done and Everybody was asked to do it.

Everybody was sure Somebody would do it.

Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.

Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybodyʹs job.

Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldnʹt do it.

It ended that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.

Today most of the situations are like this. A deadlock kind of situation is created when we start looking for others to do the job.

Five steps that we need to keep in mind for avoiding this situation:

1. Present an example to the people by start doing it. Nobody is going to get it until you get it first. Becoming the model to follow is not that easy always, but it would make the task of doing things as a group easy.

2. Establish expectations beforehand to the people that they need to do something. Just assuming inside the mind that someone is going to do the job for you is not going to work always. People generally has a tendency to avoid doing the work in absence of established expectations.

3. Inspect what you and others are doing and present it to all. It would increase the commitment on the behalf of everybody and next time when something needs to be done you would find your expectations being met. Also inspect your expectations, to avoid over expectations!

4. Get feedback and give feedback. Getting and giving feedbacks increases accountability in the group.Feedbacks and suggestions also helps us achieve the requisite level of performance overtime.

5. Share details of the things that you are doing to others in the group. It's would invite participation and would enhance the quality of work. Surely transparency and mutual respect would develop too. Also, there remains a possibility of others doing the same to you.

All the above listed steps are interlinked…so if you start doing any of them, must do the others too, so that the overall effect is a positive sum game…