Keeping Everyone in the Loop
In a previous post, we talked about finalizing a team decision, and deciding how to implement it. After you have identified the plan of action for implementing the team’s decisions, your final step is to ask one very simple: “Who is not in the room that needs to know what we just decided?” This is a great way of getting the team to identify the key stakeholders in their decisions.
The more essential their sincere commitment and ensuing actions are, the more time and effort you need to spend in rigorously considering how to attain truly engaged input. How are you going to get their support to achieve the decided-upon goals (commitment) versus simply instructing them to do it (compliance)? Those in the group who are very good at all things interpersonal can help you to both identify these concerned constituents and understand what it will take to gain their support. They can lead a discussion on how this decision will affect these key stakeholders.
Your stakeholders, who are likely be different for each of your decisions, might include people who:
- Will be directly affected by this decision
- Have final sign-off authority
- Have to implement the decision
- Could sabotage the process
The next logical step is to figure out how the team will communicate the decision to these people. What are the key messages, what are the right vehicles, and what should the timing be? The more power each stakeholder has to support or derail the decision’s approval and implementation, the more thoroughly you will need to plan the communications, and the more closely you will need to monitor their effectiveness. When you have come this far, you can’t leave this last part to chance. Use the team’s creativity to determine the most effective means of reaching your most critical stakeholders.
So there you have it: a tried and true process for ensuring your team makes better and faster decisions that include everyone’s most creative input. In future posts, we will focus on the leader’s role in making certain that these are indeed the best decisions. Moving forward, we will explore accountability, and figure out how to assess whether team members are fulfilling the commitments they’ve made. Because a decision without action is really just a hallucination!
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