Consensus is a cornerstone of contemporary management practices. It is not only essential in transitioning from hierarchical or matrix organizations to network organizations, but it is the basis for employee involvement, employee satisfaction, and making the highest quality decisions.

But why does it fail?  The most commonly cited reason is cycle time - particularly in organizations where consensus is not well-practiced or supported by the norms of the organizations. But sometimes the reason is buried in the transition from command-and-control.

So what happens when you have a consensus based organization with a few command-and-control (C&C) holdouts? When you have experienced C&C people in powerful positions in your organization, the behaviors that they have been practiced over years are very hard to change. Giving up what has served them well in the past for something that appears slow and ineffective is quite a challenge.

Consensus only works if all of the people who are to be part of the censuses are free to engage in debate and conflict around the question at hand. The challenge of the transition between C&C and consensus is that the holdouts to the old style will disable consensus by burying the diverse opinions, by squashing the voice of the people who don’t agree with them or by causing their co-workers to not want to engage their powerful presence.

While sometimes this behavior is overt, it is more likely to be subconscious. A truth about leaders is that they rarely understand the organizational power they wield; only the best understand that their anger, loudness, title, and physical presence can cause many who might engage in the debates of consensus to simply close up and not participate.

Today, when almost every project has remote employees, where most every team has people from varied cultures, the ability to accidentally inhibit participation in consensus is all the more likely.

Avoiding this is straightforward although far from simple. First, insure that everyone is participating, not simply invited to participate – especially in multi-cultural and multi-located organizations.

Secondly, identify the people who are accidentally or overtly stifling broad and inclusive participation in consensus and help them understand their organizational power, its ramifications, and how to harness it in support of moving to participative and collaborative processes.

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