Decision Making: Consensus, Individual or Leader-led?

A facilitator asks a Japanese team:  What’s your favorite color? 

Most of us would respond quickly with: Red – Green – Blue.

But this team didn’t.
Their answer? “We need to consult with one another.”

That’s not indecisiveness. It’s culture.

What this reflects is a consensus-based culture, where even simple choices are made collectively.

Mainstream culture in the U.S., by contrast, shows up as an individualist culture.  You can easily see the contrast between an individualistic expectation (“Red, green, blue… just pick one!”) and the team’s collective response (“We need to consult”).  

My podcast guest Eric Hicks, who worked in Japan and in other consensus-based cultures, shared this and a few other stories of teams who tend to use consensus.  He once found himself in a challenging position as team leader trying to get the team to make a decision:

Early on when I was trying to move a team to do something – when I thought I had locked down the logic that would help them make that decision – I was frustrated that the decision wasn’t being made.  And as I worked with them and got to understand it, It wasn’t that I didn’t have a good case – It was that everyone there had to be absolutely on the same page before moving forward.

Perfect example of a cross-cultural misalignment!  As Eric says,

It’s not right or wrong –   it’s just a different way of thinking about how you want to be individual – or how you want to stand out in a group or have consensus…

Take a few minutes to watch this short excerpt or watch the full episode (link below).

Grab a cup of tea and settle in for an engaging interview. (30 minutes)