More often than not, collaborative decision making leads to better decisions

It's all about control. Choosing a collaborative decision making style is about making a choice of what level of control you want, or need, in the decision making process.

Let's not confuse style with personality

We talk about choosing to have a collaborative style because we consider a decision making style as something you can choose when trying to make a better decision. Style criteria considers personality, but is not defined by it. In this case, we are not identifying how collaborative someone is (personality), instead, we want to identify how much collaboration to choose when picking the style for making a specific decision.

For collaborative decision making the choice that you must make is the level of collaboration to use for the decision you want to make. This applies to personal and business decisions alike.

Use the collaborative Decision Making Style Criteria to choose your level of collaboration for a given decision.

Consider the following diagram.

Plan to increase your level of collaboration when commitment to implementation or understanding of needs has to be high. High decision value and complexity are clear pointers toward more collaboration. Watch out for limited available time. It can be the great deceiver in decision making! Look at decision value as a more reliable metric for determining collaboration level as the other criteria tend to track it. Our perception of available time can be greatly distorted by our emotions (e.g., a salesperson pressuring you to make a quick decision to purchase a car).

The Bottom Line

Choosing a more collaborative decision style is likely to increase your effectiveness in making a high value decision. Increasing collaboration starts with consultation, increased participation, and in certain decisions, may lead to full consensus decision making. More collaboration comes at a loss of decision maker control and independence, but expect to see benefits from higher quality decisions that stick.

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