Consensus is the Foundation of Mediocrity

I consider myself somewhat of a “Lifetime Learner” always trying to learn new things and listen to perspectives of other people, even when I have my own opinions. The biggest reason I started studying business as a developer was because I saw the gap growing between business understanding and technical implementation and wanted to do something about it.

Recently I attended a seminar on “Managing Project Teams” where various areas of the project process were discussed in how you can help make the team work effectively together. Something really stood out for me. During the training the discussion moved to negative team dynamics.

The slide went up showing examples of “Negative Team Dynamics” which showed in bullet point examples. Most of the items seemed to make sense as they included things like, “Team Members Refuse to Work Together”. But then there was one that really caught my attention:

Team members disagree about an important topic.

Think about that for a minute… “Team members disagree about an important topic.”

For me this couldn’t be more wrong and is a fundamental reason behind teams that just don’t work well together. If teams can’t engage in healthy conflict and disagree on points they will never grow past their preexisting beliefs. All too often the practice of team building encourages the process of finding consensus within the group. In my opinion, consensus is a lie. When you put a bunch of intelligent bright people into a group the last thing that you’ll ever get them to do is agree on an important topic. If they do, the topic either isn’t really that important or your team has been conditioned to “let the matter go” in favor of a sense of consensus.

Of course the team should decide before the discussion how the solution will be decided upon, and it’s important for the team to stick with the selected solution knowing that they have put all of their opinions on the table. Patrick Lencioni talks a great deal about this type of healthy conflict in “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team“.

It frustrates me when I hear the idea of teams and team members that don’t want to stand up for something, that aren’t passionate about a specific solution. Just as I said in Start Standing for Something – be passionate, have an opinion and let that passion pull you into creating something great.