Newsletter Reprint April 1999 Effective Teams Strive for Consensus One of the conditions necessary for successful team work is team members' ability to make decisions and solve problems as a group. Some of the most effective decision-making processes include building consensus. Consensus means coming to an agreement. Creating consensus in a team setting means finding a proposal acceptable enough that all team members can support it, with no member opposing it.
Teams can reach consensus using formal and informal methods.
Highly developed teams may be able to reach consensus informally. However, new teams or groups of employees who are not familiar with each other will need more structured methods to help them build consensus methods such as brainstorming, multi-voting, and nominal group technique. Brainstorming is a simple and effective method of generating ideas in a group. It begins with a facilitator defining the problem or the topic. Then, each team member suggests ideas either in turn or as ideas arise and those ideas are written on a board or flip chart.