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How everyday engagement moments and collective intelligence decision-making improves business performance
A key challenge for leaders seeking to improve business performance is making the right decisions, fast. Numerous indicators show that many businesses are struggling to meet this challenge. The annual impact of inefficient collaboration and poor decision-making is huge, with billions being wasted on salaries spent during inefficient meetings and decisions governing everyday operations not taking important information into account.
To meet this challenge, enterprises need to optimise collaboration and boost engagement to empower a generation of leaders to make better business decisions through joint decision-making. The key to achieving this is utilising the power of anonymity, converting passive audiences into active contributors and creating everyday engagement moments in our everyday work.
These are the three tenants of what I call Listening Leadership.
Collaboration for high-impact decision-making
The way for businesses and leaders to reach the most impactful, insightful and actionable decisions is through collaboration. Harnessing the collective intelligence of your organisation is the key to good decision-making. But collaboration is the great unperfected skill of the workplace.
Most teams make use of messaging software to manage daily communication and task management. These familiar tools tend to work pretty well in facilitating collaboration, whether the team is based on-site or remotely.
Problems tend to arise when teams collaborate in ways that are more occasional and time-limited. In workshops and brainstorming sessions, we usually have the ability and the tools to succeed at the divergent stage – that phase where the goal is to get ideas on the table, bounce suggestions off each other and expand the number of options. But this is where a lot of teams run into trouble.
Collective intelligence decision-making
Where we often fall down is in that final stage where decisions are made and the next steps are agreed upon. This crucial part of any workshop or meeting often means the difference between a collaboration resulting in a high business impact or a low business impact. But it is the stage we often get so badly wrong.
We often lack both the social and technical means to define a single idea or action point to take away from the meeting. Instead, what often happens is the person with the loudest voice forces their idea through or a leader takes an executive decision outside of the meeting that doesn’t harness the collective intelligence of the group.
Bad business decisions often occur because of biases decision-makers are unaware of. Research by McKinsey found that left unchecked, unconscious biases will undermine strategic decision-making and negatively impact business performance. A simple, low-cost solution to this common problem is anonymity. When you hide the contributor’s background (seniority, gender identity, race/ethnicity, etc.), leaders and participants are free to assess the input on merit alone and free of any conscious or unconscious bias.
Businesses need a mechanism that ensures everyone in the room’s voice is heard. Harnessing the collective intelligence of the group and securing the whole team’s buy-in through inclusive decision-making. Making this whole process anonymous also allows team members to contribute honestly, freely and without bias – meaning the best idea, rather than the loudest voice, wins out.
Anonymity is key here. It gives employees the opportunity to speak freely and honestly all while knowing that their contribution will be read and understood without any unconscious bias. We know that working in this way produces an atmosphere of inclusivity and transparency that is incredibly valuable for employee engagement and trust.
A crisis of meaningful engagement in business
Another pressing issue for improving business performance at many companies right now is the challenge of engagement. Even with the best collaboration tools and practices, high business impact requires an engaged team… and employee engagement has been in crisis for some time.
When we bring pre-pandemic ways of working to the post-pandemic present, the result is a cohort of under-engaged employees. Many workers go from meeting link to meeting link on mute, communicating only through facial expressions (if they aren’t a blank square on a screen) and going through long periods of the day without expressing an opinion or an idea.
In this mode, employees often leave meetings feeling unproductive and unfulfilled by work they don’t see as meaningful. Workers are leaving jobs where they do not feel meaningfully engaged and are going off in search of a career they can feel passionate about.
Everyday engagement moments
The solution to this engagement crisis is not the virtual happy hours of the early days of the pandemic or intensive quarterly retreats to a private ranch with your team. We need to rethink the way we conduct meetings. We need to design them around everyday engagement moments.
Everyday engagement moments are moments of inclusivity where everybody gets to have their voice heard. On an organisational level, giving space to every voice can be a real challenge. Speaking up in meetings of any size (but especially large meetings) can be daunting, and giving everyone time to have their say individually can be time-consuming and inefficient. Digital tools that visualise real-time interactions and input allow for quick, easy, and efficient engagement.
The case for Listening Leadership
Collaboration and engagement are cornerstones of strong business performance – and encouraging a culture of Listening Leadership is the key to unlocking their potential.
By practicing inclusive, transparent collaborative decision-making that harnesses the collective intelligence of the organisation. By making engagement part of our daily routines through everyday engagement moments, we can ensure everyone feels included, valued, and challenged.
All this starts with a cultural shift towards talking less and listening more – and for that, it helps to have the right tools.
Find out how you can bring inclusive, efficient and productive decision-making to your organisation at mentimeter.com
Originally published on Business Reporter
