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The ability to building consensus is a critical leadership skill. What if the leader you report to doesn’t have it?

In past weeks we’ve covered several managing-up situations, including how to deal with managers who base their decision style on personal preference rather than what the situation calls for.

Sometimes, though, the problem isn’t the wrong style. It’s poor technique.

Take, for example, a decision that should be made by consensus: Either buy-in matters more than anything else, or no one person has the authority to make it.

You’re in the meeting and what started off as a productive discussion long-ago descended into mere looping. And your manager seems content to let it run its course.

What’s needed is to stop arguing about the decision, and instead agree how to make it. That’s an easier consensus to get, and it makes consensus on the decision much easier.

Start by becoming a non-combatant early. The moment you realize things are starting to loop, stop talking and make your goal distilling the key points of view being expressed.

Then, get everyone’s attention and summarize the status of the discussion. “We seem to be repeating the same points over and over. From what I can tell, these seem to be the main points of view,” and here you take control of the whiteboard (the room does have a whiteboard, doesn’t it?) to write them down as you list them. It will either be a list of between three and five alternatives, or a single alternative followed by the question, yes or no.

Next, ask your manager’s permission to try something (for this to be managing up you have to operate under his/her authority, not subvert it). After the automatic “yes,” tell the group, “I think we should be asking how we’re going to make this decision. The standard method in a situation like this is a simple comparison matrix.” That’s if you have a list of alternatives. If you have a yes/no decision instead, the standard method is a simple list of plusses and minuses.

Then ask the group whether this seems like the right approach, and if not, what might be better. If nobody answers, ask those who had been arguing the loudest if it makes sense to them.

Congratulations. You have consensus on the process.

Next is to list the criteria — the factors your group should be taking into account when making it. Get everyone’s thoughts on the board. Consolidate any repetitions in real time (“What you just said sounds a lot like x. Is it different enough that it needs to be kept separate, or should we rephrase x a bit so it covers it?”)

Not all factors are created equal, so weighting them comes next. I recommend a three point scale to keep it real simple. A factor gets a three if it’s essential, two if it’s highly important. Everything else gets a one.

To get there, vote. This is one of the few times where it’s the only practical alternative. One very effective way of handling this is to give everyone three votes. They can use all three votes on one factor if they care about it a lot, or they can spread their votes around. Just have them walk up to the whiteboard and add tally marks. Total them up, give the top third a weighting of three, second third a weighting of two and the rest a weighting of one and you’re done.

To score each factors, vote again. This time I recommend a five point scale, where five means a particular alternative is outstanding for the factor in question, and one means it stinks.

Tally, crunch the numbers, and see which alternative floats to the top.

Usually, you’ll all find there’s a clear winner. If so, declare it and perform a “consensus check” — go around the room and ask everyone in it, one at a time, if they can live with it. If anyone answers no, here’s the key: Don’t ask why. Don’t do it.

Instead, ask what they think was wrong with the process that they think it delivered the wrong answer. Whatever they say, will almost certainly be just one more factor to include in the analysis. So add it. It almost certainly won’t change the result.

Most likely, though, once everyone has gone through the process together, they’ll accept the answer it delivers. That’s when you turn to your manager to ask, “Does this make sense to you?”

You aren’t trying to subvert your manager’s authority after all. You’re just helping your manager exercise it more efficiently.

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Let’s say you have a manager who makes all the decisions. Now let’s say you don’t find your job particularly rewarding. But (with apologies to Mark Twain), I repeat myself.

Now say you’d like to improve the situation through the art of managing up. Some background on organizational decision-making will help:

As with everything else that has to get done, decisions are subject to the six dimensions of optimization: Fixed cost, incremental cost, cycle time, throughput, quality, and excellence.

Authoritarian decisions have low fixed and incremental costs, short cycle times, and high throughput. That’s all good. Their quality, however, is spotty, and with them, excellence (the catch-all category for positive attributes like flexibility and creativity that aren’t easily measured), is in short supply. Excellence is where broad commitment and buy-in would be categorized, and with authoritarian decisions there’s none of it.

Unlike consensus, where this form of excellence is the major saving grace.

The accompanying table summarizes the comparison between authoritarian decision-making and the other available decision styles (note that delegation’s attributes depend on the decision style chosen by the assignee).

Fixed Cost

Incremental Cost

Cycle Time

Throughput

Quality (Absence of Defects)

Excellence (The Above and Beyond Stuff)
Authoritarian

Low

Low

Short

Very Good

Poor

Poor
Consensus

High

High

Long

Poor

Modest

Very Good
Consultation

Low

Modest

Modest

Good

High

Very Good
Delegation

Low

Modest

Depends

Very Good

Very Good

Very Good
Democracy

High

High

Modest

Modest

Poor

Poor

Why do many managers prefer authoritarian decision-making? It might be the aforementioned endorphin rush, but more likely it’s due to:

  • Simple impatience: All other forms of decision-making take more time and attention.
  • Cost and time: Even a patient person might not choose to invest significant amounts of staff time and attention to the decisions that have to get made.
  • The company they keep: Hear “We aren’t going to hold hands singing Kumbaya,” enough times and anyone, your boss included, will think twice about entertaining anyone else’s thoughts before making a decision.
  • Lack of awareness: They don’t realize there are alternatives other than authoritarianism and consensus.

So there you are, working for someone who excludes your entire team from all decisions. How do you get them to spread the joy?

The odds-on, risk-free course of action: You don’t. Most authoritarian decision-makers used this mode throughout their career. And as thus far they’ve done better in their career than the people who report to them have done in theirs (by definition), they have little reason to change.

Also … the problem is that they aren’t interested in your opinion, right? If they aren’t, they certainly aren’t interested in your opinion about the value of asking your opinion.

Odds are you won’t be able to do anything about it. So trying to change things means sticking your neck out –lot of chance for downside and not much for improvement.

Sorry.

But if you insist, here are two alternatives that might have at least some impact:

Open-door policy: Yes, most open-door policies have more in common with pressure-relief valves than with drive train components, but unless you think your boss’s boss is incapable of basic discretion (unlikely, as indiscretion is a career-limiting character trait), the only risk is your manager seeing you walking through the open door and asking you what that was all about. Have an unthreatening generic explanation ready, just in case.

The basic rules for using the open door are to (1) be calm and confident; and (2) make a business case, not a personal case.

Calm and confident matters. Sound upset and emotional and it’s about you, not your manager. You want to sound like you’re your manager’s social and business equal, where your roles could easily be reversed and nothing untoward would come of it.

As for making a business case rather than a personal case, this means focusing on how much better your manager’s decisions would be if the experts he/she hired were in a position to influence them (and be prepared with some examples). Don’t focus on exclusion’s impact on morale. This is business. The unimportant schmucks at the bottom have hurt feelings and morale that depends on managerial feel-good behavior. You don’t want to sound like one of them.

Confidant/protégé: Even the most autocratic managers have employees they confide in and (sometimes) help in their careers. There are so many reasons to want this role that using it to suggest more staff inclusion in decision-making is almost a waste.

If you can achieve confidant-hood or protégé-dom, you can use it to suggest more inclusion. But on the other hand: If you’re in this position, your manager already includes you in decisions. Are you sure you want to be so altruistic as to try to spread the wealth?

Suggestion: Don’t, other than suggesting something like, “You know, Jim, Angela knows a lot about this subject. Why not just delegate the decision to her?” if the opportunity presents itself.

That’s enough. It might even make the point.

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