Question

Please discuss In team base environments, what has been your experience when consensus cannot be achieved? what is generally done?

Answer 1

There are several instances where consensus is not achieved in my experience working in a team. In most of the cases, aggressors in the team want to dominate the team and want others to accept their opinion. This leads to a conflict with most of them disagreeing to the aggressor member in the team. In such cases, we used to brainstorm for various options from the team members. Each member comes up with his opinion or idea pertaining to the issue. All the ideas are listed and discussed for about 2 minutes before the team. The similar listed ideas are combined to remove the duplicates from the list. Now the options are shortened and the team selects a single best option from the list to solve the issue and arrive at a solution. This solves most of the issues in my team and a consensus is reached.
There are some cases where consensus does not arrive even after the brainstorming session is conducted. In such cases, our team moves to the simple voting mechanism to arrive at a consensus. A simple voting of the various options arrived as a result of brainstorming is conducted in the team. Each member votes for an option and the option with the maximum votes at the top is selected as the best option and a consensus arrives in the team.
In case of a conflict among the team members, effective communication to resolve the misunderstandings among the members is used to arrive at a consensus. It is normal to have differences of opinion, understanding, values and thought process of the individuals that lead to a conflict. In one instance, a member of the team strongly believed that the team leader is a dominant and arrogant person and voted against the leader all the time. Once her emotions went high and openly scolded the team leader in front of the team. This is just a perception of the member and has totally misunderstood the team leader as being dominant and arrogant. In this case, the member was first counseled by a neutral person to find the cause of the conflict and training is provided to control her emotions to prevent conflict by developing more listening skills. Then the team leader directly communicates with the emotional member and conveys clearly that he is not dominant and respects her opinion. This communication is effective in clearing the misunderstanding and wrong perception of the member about the team leader. As a result of these steps, team conflict was resolved in a positive manner and a consensus was reached in the team.