What are three important techniques that managers can use to promote creativity in group decision making situations?

Decision-making is an essential business skill that drives organizational performance. A survey of more than 750 companies by management consulting firm Bain found a 95 percent correlation between decision-making effectiveness and financial results. The data also showed companies that excel at making and executing decisions generate returns nearly six percent higher than those of their competitors.

At many organizations, it’s up to managers to make the key decisions that influence business strategy. Research shows, however, that 61 percent of them believe at least half the time they spend doing so is ineffective.

If you want to avoid falling into this demographic, here are five decision-making techniques you can employ to improve your management skills and help your organization succeed.

Decision-Making Techniques for Managers

1. Take a Process-Oriented Approach

One of your primary responsibilities as a manager is to get things done with and through others, which involves leveraging organizational processes to accomplish goals and produce results. According to Harvard Business School Professor Len Schlesinger, who’s featured in the online course Management Essentials, decision-making is one of the processes that can be used to your advantage.

“The majority of people think about making decisions as an event,” Schlesinger says. “It’s very rare to find a single point in time where a ‘decision of significance’ is made and things go forward from there. What we’re really talking about is a process. The role of the manager in overseeing that process is straightforward, yet, at the same time, extraordinarily complex.”

When establishing your decision-making process, your first action should be to frame the issue at hand to ensure the right questions are being asked, and everyone agrees on what needs to be decided. From there, build your team and manage group dynamics to analyze the problem and craft a viable solution. By following a structured, multi-step process, you can achieve the desired outcome.

2. Involve Your Team in the Process

Decision-making doesn’t have to be done in a vacuum. Involve your team members in the process to bring multiple points of view into the conversation and stimulate creative problem-solving.

Research shows team decision-making is highly effective because it pools individuals’ collective knowledge and experience, leading to more innovative solutions and helping to surface and overcome hidden biases among the group.

By considering others’ perspectives on how to approach and surmount a specific challenge, you can become more aware of your own implicit biases and manage your team with a greater level of emotional intelligence.

Related: Emotional Intelligence Skills: What They Are & How to Develop Them

3. Foster a Collaborative Mindset

It’s critical to foster the right mindset early in the decision-making process to ensure your team works collaboratively, not contentiously.

When facing a decision, there are two key mindsets to consider, which are:

• Advocacy: A mindset that views decision-making as a contest. In a group with an advocacy mindset, individuals seek to persuade others, defend their positions, and downplay their weaknesses.
• Inquiry: A mindset that navigates decision-making with collaborative problem-solving. Unlike the persuasion and lobbying approach of advocacy, an inquiry mindset centers on individuals testing and evaluating assumptions by presenting balanced arguments, considering alternatives, and being open to constructive criticism.

“On the surface, advocacy and inquiry approaches look deceptively similar,” says HBS Professor David Garvin in Management Essentials. “Both involve individuals engaged in debates, drawing on data, developing alternatives, and deciding on future directions. But, despite these similarities, inquiry and advocacy produce very different results.”

A recent study by software company Cloverpop found that decisions made and executed by diverse teams deliver 60 percent better results. Strive to instill your team members with an inquiry mindset, so they’re empowered to think critically and feel their points of view are welcomed and valued, rather than discouraged and dismissed.

4. Create and Uphold Psychological Safety

In order for your team members to feel comfortable sharing their diverse perspectives and working collaboratively, it’s crucial to create and maintain an environment of psychological safety.

According to research by Google, psychological safety is the most important dynamic found among high-performing teams.

“Psychological safety is essential—first and foremost—for getting the information and perspectives out,” says HBS Professor Amy Edmondson in Management Essentials. “It’s helpful to be able to talk about what we know and think in an effective and thoughtful way before coming to a final conclusion.”

To help your team feel psychologically safe, be respectful and give fair consideration when listening to everyone’s opinions. When voicing your own point of view, be open and transparent, and adapt your communication style to meet the needs of the group. By actively listening and being attuned to the emotions and attitudes of the team, you can forge a stronger bond of trust with your employees and make them feel more engaged.

Related: 5 Tips for Managing Change in the Workplace

5. Reiterate the Goals and Purpose of the Decision

Throughout the decision-making process, it’s vital to avoid a common management pitfall and not lose sight of the goals and purpose of the decision on the table.

The goals you’re working toward need to be clearly articulated at the outset of the decision-making process—and constantly reiterated throughout—to ensure they’re ultimately achieved.

“It’s easy, as you get into these conversations, to get so immersed in one substantive part of the equation, that you lose track of what the actual purpose is,” Schlesinger says.

Revisiting purpose is especially important when making decisions related to complex initiatives, such as organizational change, to ensure your team feels motivated and aligned, and understands how their contributions tie into larger objectives.

Making Decisions Effectively

Enhancing your decision-making capabilities can be an integral part of your journey to become a better manager and advance your career. In addition to real-world experience, furthering your education by taking a management training course can equip you with the skills and knowledge to enable both your team and organization to thrive.

Do you want to design, direct, and shape organizational processes to your advantage? Explore our eight-week online course Management Essentials, and discover how you can influence the context and environment in which decisions get made at your organization.

Project managers have to deal with different types of people in any activities and it is the role of the project manager to initiate communication to get ideas from his or her team members. Team members suggesting something related to a particular idea or concept is very much welcome in Project Management. This is the reason why it is so important to use group creativity techniques.

Group creativity techniques are used to generate ideas within a group of people or stakeholders. There are different activities that project managers can organize to identify ideas for the project to meet the requirements. Below mentioned are the different types of techniques that can enhance creativity and decision-making within the group.

Group Creativity Techniques 

When asked the question about providing ideas for project requirements, no one exactly knows where to start. However if the project manager asks about specific rather than abstract concepts, the team members are much more likely to contribute to something that relates to a particular area of requirements. This process is called as ‘Group Creativity Technique.’

Group Creativity Techniques in Project Management

The critical feature of the group creativity technique is that it allows the project manager to collect new ideas and concepts from the team members by initiating proper communication. It’s a technique that is used to generate ideas within a group of stakeholders because the stakeholders are the decision-makers when it comes to finalizing the deliverables of a product.

Methods for Effective Creativity Techniques

The techniques used for enhancing the creativity of the groups:

Brainstorming

It is a group creativity technique in which members are allowed to generate as many ideas/requirements as possible without criticism. The brainstorming technique does not prioritize the ideas. In this technique, the participants are safe to present their very own creative ideas even though some ideas are unrealistic. During the process, all the generated ideas/requirements are recorded without any assessments. Additionally, a productive brainstorming session triggers one idea from another, enabling the team members to spot the connections between the ideas. It is important to note that this type of synergy is not found during one-to-one sessions.

The Nominal Group Technique

It is a technique for small group discussion in which ideas and requirements are ranked and prioritized by all the team members of the group after generating the list of requirements. It enhances the brainstorming with a voting process that is used to rank the most useful ideas for further prioritization. This technique prevents the domination of a single person over the discussion by allowing the voices of all members to be represented. The project manager should ask the team to rate each idea under a particular heading for providing a better result. All the requirements that are generated or chosen should be testable and measurable.

Mind Mapping

It is used through individual sessions with each team member. The project manager then consolidates the ideas into a single map to create a common ground of understanding. A technique that starts with the idea of the project in the middle, and then stakeholders branch out from the central idea and generate more requirements. This process will provide an overview of the project, which will allow the project manager to determine if there is an imbalance in the requirements or whether one set of needs was weighted more heavily than others.

Affinity Diagram

It takes ideas and groups them into categories with similar ideas or requirements. Thus, they are arranged with ideas that they have an “affinity” (similarities) with. It is a technique used to classify a large number of ideas for analysis or review. Affinity diagrams can either be used alone or in conjunction with brainstorming and the nominal group techniques as well.

Multi-criteria Decision Analysis

When the process of gathering requirements is taking place, the project manager often needs to balance several criteria to determine the best set of requirements for a product. Multi-criteria decision analysis identifies the various measures that the project manager will use to evaluate requirements and then assigns a high-level value to each criterion like risk levels, uncertainty, and valuation, to assess and rank many ideas.

Conclusion

The collective collaboration of the individuals adds value to the end product and eventually leads to customer satisfaction. When the requirement is met with high efficiency and coordination amongst the group, the group creativity techniques prove to be one of the best practices a project manager can use to keep the group motivated.

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