Recently, while facilitating leadership meetings and offsites, one of the patterns I have observed across multiple teams is a tendency to “violently agree” with each other. What does this look like?
Team member A: I think we should do XYZ…
Team member B: I agree! Here’s why I agree…
Team member C: I am totally on board. Let me explain why…
And so on for another 20 minutes… (sound familiar? Can you think of a meeting you’ve been in where it feels like the group is endlessly talking in circles without landing on a clear decision?).
While it’s not necessarily a bad thing to hear the different perspectives around the table (and certainly important in general to make sure you are creating space/safety to hear all voices), when you are trying to accomplish an ambitious agenda or stay on schedule this pattern can quickly eat up all of your time when it happens over and over.
In the scenario described above, Team Member A has made a proposal to the group, which gets totally lost when each participant chimes in to “violently agree”. One meeting tool which can be very helpful is called “Decider Protocol”. Developed as part of the “Core Protocols” framework by Jim and Michele McCarthy, the Decider protocol works like this:
When you think you have a clear proposal to make to your team, or it sounds like the team is aligning around a direction, you call it out by saying, “I would like to propose we do…” followed by a countdown of 3, 2, 1. At the end of the countdown, every meeting participant holds their thumb out to vote. Thumbs up means “I’m on board with the proposal, no need to discuss further”. Thumbs in the middle means “I’m neutral, but onboard if the majority votes yes”. Thumbs down means “I’m not ready to support this proposal”.
This can immediately help reveal where the group stands. If everyone votes thumbs up, the decision is made and you can move on to the next topic. If one or more people vote thumbs down, the follow-up up question becomes “Is there anything we can to to modify the proposal that would get you to a thumbs up?”. Those who voted thumbs down can than clarify what is holding them back. In some cases, this may be a simple request to better clarify or refine the proposal, while in other cases there may be deeper concerns that cannot be resolved in the meeting. In this case, it is most useful for the group to recognize this and move on with an agreement to sort out the issues offline before coming back to the proposal.
I have worked with teams that have applied this from everything to talent review meetings to leadership offsites, and the feedback has consistently been that this tool helps bring efficiency AND clarity to their team decision making process.