Quashing the evil effect of group thinking

It’s awesome when everyone agrees, isn’t it?

“Groupthink” is not rigorous like something you’d want your employees engaging in regularly, does it? Indeed, groupthink is a conformist mindset that interferes with creativity and independent thinking.

Groupthink within your organization is not supposed to be a catastrophe that large, but it could still lead you to a plunging wrong path. It's important that employees feel they are not derailing things by offering their own opinions and ideas that run counter to prevailing sentiment.?Leaders have the commanding words to influence a team to effectively work towards their objectives.

Understanding and recognizing groupthink allows a strong leader to prevent groupthink or pull their team away from it. If you foster an environment that allows team members to express individual ideas as well as argue against proposed ideas, you’ll be able to triumph over groupthink.

Here are some operational ideas than can be put straightforwardly into action:

1. When allocating responsibilities, try to avoid mentioning your views or preferences. Rather, give members time to come up with their ideas first.
2. Assign at least one member to play the part of “devil’s advocate,” or “critical evaluator.” This allows each member to freely air objections and doubts. This can be a different person for each meeting. Studies show that teams using devil’s advocacy outperformed teams that didn’t.
3. Inspire the team to get to the core of a problem and make the best decision possible.
4. Use the Six Thinking Hats approach. Consider all effective substitutions. Promote mental flexibility to determine strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots.
5. Discuss group decisions with an outside member to collect impartial views, or have the group invite outside experts to meetings.
6. Cherish constructive criticism between members.
7. As a leader, you should curtail being present in group meetings to avoid excessively influencing decisions.
8. Avoid immediately criticizing other ideas and insulting team members.
9. Encourage diversity. Research suggests that when there are many sources of diversity within a team, it becomes difficult for team members to form homogeneous subgroups.

Great leadership encourages a diversity of lookouts to provide alternative courses of action. By maintaining a healthy atmosphere for divergent thinking, you will steer your team away from groupthink. To burst that bubble and create more leaders instead of followers. “The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.” The problem is, this is easier said than done.

Next and last in the series is - Egos of capable is worst.?

In that final post for this series, I will share the other side of the coin, when your team does not arrive at any decision due to conflicts. We will close this series with a few tips on how I manage conflicts among the capables and help them arrive at a decision.

Stay Tuned!