Conversation 5: Making Decisions
Welcome back to our series, 8 Conversations for Shared Leadership. In our last post, we discussed the importance of communication styles. This time, we’re talking about how to create a culture of collaborative decision-making.
If you’ve ever planned and taken a road trip with loved ones, you know that shared decision-making can get tricky fast. Of course, the stakes are even higher when we’re talking about work that advances justice and equity.
As a facilitator, my goal is always to increase a group's trust and ability to collaborate. I start this process by modeling shared decision-making when creating the agenda. I simply cannot host a training or retreat without getting the input of the planners and participants about what direction they want to take.
For a recent retreat I hosted, I sent a survey in advance so participants could share preferred topics and desired outcomes and even request the music we played during breaks. This kind of preparation sets the stage for the day—with everyone arriving with a spirit of collaboration. Now if we could just figure out how to apply this approach to family vacation planning…
Even when we intend to share power and genuinely trust the people we’re working with, we can often find it difficult to relinquish control of an outcome.
This is true especially when the work requires that we move quickly, because it’s easy to race ahead and skip the crucial step of getting aligned with the people we’re working with on how we want to move together.
This shows up most prominently for those of us who are systematically disempowered by societal systems. Once we have power, it can feel scary to loosen our grip on what we’ve worked so hard to attain.
However, we always have the choice to approach each other with curiosity and humility, to treat each other as whole people. We can let go of our need for control to see how diverse thinking can create multiple solutions to a problem.
Prompts for Conversation #5
You can use these prompts to inspire and expand your conversations within your team environment:
When have I experienced effective shared decision-making? What did I learn from the process?
What do I need to let go of in order to see multiple solutions to a problem?
How can I invite others into more decisions that impact them?
I suggest we ask these questions first of ourselves and then share our responses with our co-leaders.
I also recommend a second set of questions that can help you practically approach decision-making through a shared power lens. Pulled from Great Leaders Have No Rules by Kevin Kruse, these are questions you can ask yourself every day or every week:
What decisions am I willing to delegate to team members?
What decisions do they wish I would delegate to them?
What information do they need to have in order to make the right decision?
Need some ideas and tools? Take a moment to review 10 of the Most Effective Group Decision Making Techniques and pick up to 3 approaches with which you feel most comfortable.
Hear more stories about making decisions together in my conversation with Alicia Bell in Episode 9 of the Shared Power Podcast. You can watch on YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts. Enjoy!
Up next is Conversation 6: Navigating Conflict.
You can download the infographic of the 8 essential conversations to share with co-leaders.
Be sure to listen to season one of our Shared Power Podcast to learn more about the conversations, why I believe they are key to advancing justice, and ways to apply them to our work and movements.
Learn more about Mia’s facilitation offerings based on the eight conversations.