Improve Decision Making in a Team
Improving decision-making in a team is one of the most important steps you can take to accelerate execution and performance. If your leadership team struggles with slow, unclear, or poor-quality decisions, the issue is rarely just about intelligence or individual skill. It’s more often about how the team operates.
In our work with senior teams, we see three common causes of poor team decision-making: a broken process, low-quality dialogue, and underdeveloped meeting practices. The good news? All three are fixable.
Clarify the Decision-Making Process
A good decision-making process answers three key questions:
- Who is driving the process?
- Who is the decision-maker?
- How will the decision be made?
Sometimes the process is clear but informal. That’s fine—until it breaks down. When a decision gets stuck, made twice, or revisited repeatedly, it’s often because one or more of those questions hasn’t been answered.
When in doubt, make the process explicit. Doing so helps clarify roles, reduce confusion, and keep the team aligned. It also builds trust by removing ambiguity about who owns what.
Raise the Quality of Dialogue
Strong teams engage in high-quality dialogue. That means it’s safe for people to speak up, challenge ideas, and offer different perspectives. When team members don’t feel safe—or when one or two voices dominate—important insights go unsaid.
Decision quality improves when the conversation strikes a balance between advocacy (pushing for a position) and inquiry (exploring ideas and asking questions). Too much advocacy leads to rigidity. Too much inquiry leads to indecision. The goal is productive tension, not agreement for its own sake.
Unresolved conflict can also undermine good dialogue. When teams avoid hard conversations, that tension tends to leak into decision-making, either by silencing dissent or dragging the discussion off-course.
Improve Meeting Processes
Many team decisions fail not because of the topic itself, but because the meeting wasn’t structured to support the conversation.
To support better decisions, use these practices:
- Send pre-read materials ahead of time, with enough lead time for review.
- Include framing questions to focus attention on what matters most.
- Allocate enough time on the agenda to explore the issue fully.
These simple steps raise the level of discussion in the room and allow people to contribute more thoughtfully. That, in turn, leads to stronger, faster decisions.
Don’t Blame the IQ in the Room
It’s tempting to chalk up poor decisions to someone’s lack of skill or judgment. In some cases, that might be true. But more often, the root cause is how the team is functioning as a unit.
If the team hasn’t aligned on how decisions get made, created room for healthy debate, or structured meetings well, even the smartest people will struggle to make good calls.
What Better Decision Making Looks Like
When a leadership team improves how it makes decisions, it sees results quickly:
- Less rework and second-guessing
- Faster execution on strategic priorities
- Higher trust and confidence across the team
Improving decision-making in a team is a performance multiplier. Start by naming the problem, then work the fix at the process, dialogue, and meeting levels.
Build a More Effective Leadership Team
If your team struggles with decision making—or any of the core drivers of effectiveness—it may be time to step back and assess how the team is working.
KSE Leadership’s Team Effectiveness Profile (TEP) is a fast, research-backed tool that gives leadership teams insight into where they’re strong and where they need to grow. It helps teams spot and address issues across alignment, accountability, decision making, trust, conflict, and more.
We partner with leadership teams across industries to improve how they operate and perform. If you’re curious how the TEP might help your team, we’d be happy to share more.
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