5. Make a Final Decision.
After your revisit conversations, take the discussion back to the decision table and finalize the decision. Leave this meeting with a communication plan for the entire organization.
6. Inform Stakeholders FIRST.
Before you announce a decision to the entire organization, take time to reengage anyone you asked to provide input into the decision first. Informing them of the final decision first does two things:
- It validates their opinion and reinforces that they were heard and
- It allows you to engage their support if the final decision isn’t what they suggested or desired.
This is so crucial to get right. If you want your team to provide input moving forward, they must feel heard today. When a staff member offers feedback that is not taken exactly, the temptation is for them to feel unheard. You can overcome this by explaining the entire thought process and asking them to commit, even if they aren’t sure they agree.
7. Take the Decision Public.
Finally, now you can take the decision to the masses. Of course, inform people in groups, beginning with those closest to the decision table. In my church example, this would mean telling department directors first, then staff (maybe at a staff meeting), our volunteer teams, and finally, our church.
A Secondary Benefit to This Approach
One more thing you’ll love about this approach. When you take your time to engage multiple people throughout the organization about a decision under consideration, you begin moving people mentally and emotionally from how things are to how things may become.
Think about it. When you make a leadership decision, you process and consider for weeks. Maybe months. Then, you announce the decision to your team and expect them to be onboard in a minute. It took you three weeks to decide, and you want them excited and in agreement in three minutes. When you follow a decision process, as I outlined above, you can float potential changes or ideas throughout the organization without them feeling like an actual change or directive.
I did this all the time at Woodstock City Church. I’d see someone in the hall and say, “I noticed our service is pretty crowded at 11 a.m. Do you think people would attend a 1:00 p.m. service if we added that one day?” Think about what I just did. The person doesn’t feel like we’re making this change tomorrow, but they will certainly give me some unfiltered feedback and probably pass my “just thinking” idea along to their team.
Sure, you can’t do this with every decision (e.g., “I’m thinking of laying off 15 people. How do you think that will affect our staff?”). But you can float out plenty of disruptive ideas and begin to engage people in the thought of change before announcing the reality of a change.
This article originally appeared here and is used by permission.
