I just found out about consensus management and as much as I believe it to be a complete myth and not worthy of my time and space on NIT Trichy Inc., here I am, writing about it because lets face it-its fascinating.
Consensus management, from what I understand , is a form of management practiced in which everyone , and literally everyone, has a say in company policies and decision making. It can be practiced from NGOs to corporate, from clubs and teams to professional organizations. When everyone has a say in decision making here are the not-so-obvious benefits
- Outfit looks more democratic
- Organization moves smoothly towards a common goal
- Members have a sense of responsibility
The obvious impending disasters can be
- Utter chaos and mass disagreements
- Difficulty in organization
- Organizational structure loses its meaning
Lets just move away from these nitty-gritties.Just think for a moment its not feasible or cost-effective to have everyone in an organization having a say in decision making. No one could be held accountable for wrong decisions, CEOs would lose their chair value and there is potential for massive chaos. The credentials of all the people having equal say is also a debatable point of view. Hence for good reason virtually very few organizations practice consensus management.
But here’s why some actually do , only in part , maybe , but they do follow the principles.Here are the reasons why they do follow consensus management
- Loyalty to its employees- If you can have a say in the decisions the company takes the company in a way involves you and is a way of saying “Listen, We care for your opinion, It’s important to us”
- Attaching a certain snippet of responsibility by saying that we shall hold you accountable and responsible if certain things go wrong
When I said, consensus management is practiced only in snippets, I meant this : The real decisions are taken by the CEOs and the directors themselves but this is a good technique of keeping employees involved in the company and also being transparent about how the company functions at the upper echelons.
you said that everyone has a say in the decision making process. shouldn’t create much trouble since it is the decision maker who will be held accountable. works very much like a student group of a college does, isn’t it?
No not at all ,
1. It does create a problem,as it means implementation of voting or democratic methods for a lot of things , even trivial processes such as CEO benefits and everything. Speaking of which , the janitor may not make a neutral decision in the matter of CEO bonuses as he obviously opposes it. However we all know that it is THE method Firms and Financials across the world implement in order to retain top talent.
2.Student groups of colleges have mastered the art of faking consensus management. ( I can vouch for Fest organising committees of NIT Trichy, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Bombay and of course E-Cell, NITT).They pretend to take the whole groups opinions but the decision maker in every department (PR,publicity,marketing,associations) is always one.
(Recently in International Relations Unit, E-Cell I assigned individual responsibilities to each member, one decision maker only)