Deciding How to Decide

There are different decisions to make and different ways to decide. So how do you choose? Decision-making researchers (yup, they exist) suggest the following techniques:

    - Make the decision alone without any group member input.
    - Get opinions from a few key members of the group, but decide alone.
    - Decide with a few key members.
    - Get input from entire group, but decide alone or with key members.
    - Make a decision together with the entire group.

Of course, you can also ask someone to make the decision without your involvement (e.g. ask an advisor or count daisy petals), but the decision-making researchers don’t find those options interesting.

As a student leader, I think the impulse is generally to decide things democratically (at least it was for me). This is the best approach if the result of the decision is going to affect your team members directly (e.g. time of your meeting). But there are many other decisions that other people don’t need to and don’t want to think about.

For example, my attempt at having all my group members decide on a banner was completely unsuccessful, and a waste of time because I ended up waiting weeks for input that never came and then made the decision by myself. Even my attempt at deciding together with two key members was unsuccessful when I tried to get us to pick out chairs for our new office. I got two nearly identical email responses from each of them saying something like, “Whatever you choose is fine. The curvy one looks weird, but whatever.” FYI: I went with the “curvy” chairs, and everyone seemed happy with them (great back support).

In short, some decisions need group consensus and some need one decider (and everything in between). I think it’s okay if that one decider is you as long as your team is comfortable with you making decisions and the other members have opportunities to decide independently as well. Please spare the daisies.

Comments

[Crystal Williams]

Hi Tania!

This is an outstanding post. And a wonderful blog! I opened up a thread on CollegeWikis just now about making decisions and added the link back here: http://www.collegewikis.com/www/topics/tips-for-making-decisions. I'm hoping all students will take time out to read The Student Leader.

Great job!

Crystal Williams
CollegeWikis Community Coordinator

[Tania]

Thanks so much, Crystal. CollegeWikis is such a good idea. I can't wait to see how it develops. Best of luck with it!!!