8 Ways to Get the Most Out of a Consensus-Based Organization

Is your organization consensus-based? What does that even mean?

A consensus-based organization makes decisions by ensuring that the entire management agrees and approves before moving forward. This could be in regards to anything from a company philosophy to event details, or the website your organization is setting up. For a clearer grasp, think of being consensus-based as a “big tent” that includes a large group of employees coming from diverse backgrounds, or in a larger scale, it may be that your organization is under a larger umbrella organization. In addition to these, a consensus-based organization strives to achieve collaboration, democratic leadership, and agreement among its team members.

A consensus-based organization is focused on its mission and places responsibility on its employees and assigns leaders to highlight and amplify the organization’s mission. The mission is where all aspects of marketing return. In every decision-making process, we must ask ourselves, “does this reflect our mission?”. This type of questioning, problem-solving and agreement extends into community-building initiatives, social, cultural and educational programs, community resources, experiential programs, mission trips, allocations of financial resources, along with both community and public relations. It is intrinsic to every piece of the process and every source of engagement.

For consensus-based organizations, it is highly important to confirm the accuracy and tone of its content and messaging. There are checkpoints along the way to ensure all is well before moving forward. For instance, if you have a newsletter with articles that must be approved by every concerned professional prior to publishing, each item in the newsletter will be checked for style, tone, editing, imagery, relevancy, overall message and adherence to the overall mission of the organization. Yes, the approval process can be time consuming. However, the benefit from this is that every movement forward is a collective step and one that fully represents the whole organization.

To make the most of this organizational type, we suggest the following:

• Establish and agree on the goals of the project
• Develop ways to work towards constructive criticism
• Simple solutions can be good solutions
• Get content pre-approved by concerned higher ups before implementation
• Define what needs to be measured early on
• Set timeframes and incorporate approval milestones
• Decide who must be involved in the approval process
• Provide edits in batches, rather than pieces, for faster productivity

As always, we are here for you! We can help you achieve all these and much more when you contact us.

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