Participative Leadership

What participative leadership is

Participative leadership (القيادة التشاركية) is a style in which the leader involves team members in analysing a question and in making the decision, to varying degrees, while the leader remains responsible for the outcome to management. The sharing lies in thinking and in the decision, not in accountability: everyone speaks before the decision, and the leader carries what follows from it.

Its degrees vary according to one question asked of each decision: who decides in the end? If the answer is the leader after hearing the team, it is consultation. If the answer is the group including the leader, it is a joint decision. If the leader had decided before asking, what took place is not participation, even if it was called a meeting.

What the degrees of participation are

Participation is not one thing. Between consultation and delegation there are degrees, and the leader chooses among them according to the decision.

• Consultation. The leader asks each member for an opinion and for any reservations, then decides alone and announces the reasons. The decision belongs to the leader.
• Joint decision. The leader and the team discuss the options and agree on one by consensus or by vote. The decision belongs to the group, and the leader is one of its members, though responsibility to management stays with the leader.
• Decision within limits. The leader sets the frame of budget, deadline and purpose, and the team decides inside it. This degree comes close to employee empowerment, which means giving an employee the authority to take decisions within the scope of the work without referring back each time.

The mistake is for a leader to announce one degree and practise another. A leader who announces consultation and behaves as if the decision were joint gives the team an impression of authority it was never given. A leader who announces a joint decision and then overturns it loses the team’s trust.

What happens when a team shares in choosing a shift schedule

Imagine a manager choosing between two schedules for evening shifts in a team of 9. Under consultation, the manager hears from each member what they fear in each schedule, and may discover that one of the two disrupts employees with evening commitments. The manager then decides and explains. Under a vote, the first schedule is chosen by five votes to four. The decision is procedurally sound, yet 4 of the 9, which is 44.4% of the team, lost the vote, and they may comply while dissatisfied.

The point is that a vote is not a condition of participative leadership. A consultation in which each member’s concerns are dealt with may serve those with reservations better than a ballot settled by a single vote. What follows the decision matters as much: those who opposed it need to learn how their objections were taken into account.

How a leader prepares a participation meeting

The preparation starts by announcing what is being asked. Before the meeting the team is told in writing what decision is on the table, which degree of participation applies to it, when the decision will be taken, and what information is available. The meeting time is then divided. Suppose a meeting of 60 minutes for a team of 9 besides the leader: five minutes are given to presenting the question, 45 minutes to opinions (five minutes for each member), five to summarising, and five in reserve.

We suggest that the leader speak last, so that the meeting does not form around the leader’s view. At the close the leader repeats what was heard and asks: “Have I summarised what you said as you meant it?” If they answer “no”, the leader returns to what was missed before deciding.

When participative leadership suits and when it does not

It suits a situation in which the team holds knowledge the leader lacks, such as field staff who know what obstructs the work, and in which there is time for discussion. It also suits a decision whose success depends on the commitment of those who carry it out, since a person who took part in shaping the decision understands the reasons for it.

It does not suit a crisis that calls for a decision within minutes. It does not suit a decision already fixed by a higher authority that the leader cannot change, where asking the team only creates the false impression that opinion will have an effect. Nor does it suit a team lacking the information that would allow it to judge, since asking it then amounts to requesting an opinion on a subject not fully put before it.

How much time participation costs

Participation has a cost that can be calculated. A meeting of one hour for a team of 9 uses 9 working hours of the team’s time, while a decision taken by the leader alone uses none of what the team would spend. The size and effect of the decision justify the cost.

Suppose a decision will occupy each member of the team for 40 hours of carrying it out, which is 9 × 40 = 360 hours. If we assume that listening to the team saves 5% of the effort that would have been lost in rework, the saving is 18 hours, twice the cost of the meeting. A decision that occupies each member for only two hours comes to 18 hours in total, and the same saving is 0.9 hours, less than one hour. For this reason the style is not applied to every decision, and wider consultation is kept for large decisions or those that are hard to reverse.

What participative leadership rests on

Participative leadership rests on the employee being able to give an opinion without it being counted against the employee, which is psychological safety. Without this safety, a consultation meeting may end in an apparent consensus. The group may then take a decision that none of its members wants, because each assumed that the others did, which is the situation named the Abilene paradox. We suggest asking for opinions in writing before the meeting, or from each person in turn, so that the loudest voice does not come ahead of the others. The leader also needs time that allows for discussion, since a meeting held on the last day before the decision may amount to recording an opinion already settled.

It also rests on the employee being heard before a decision that concerns that employee. This is one element of procedural justice, the employee’s judgement of the way a decision was reached. An employee may accept an outcome that is unwelcome if the path to it appears sound, and may reject an outcome in the employee’s favour if there is no trust in the path to it.

How participative leadership differs from neighbouring leadership styles

It does not conflict with the others, since it answers a different question. In situational leadership, the style of supervision is chosen according to the employee’s condition toward the task, and one of the states that suit involving the employee in the decision is that of a capable employee whose confidence has not yet settled. Participative leadership, by contrast, describes a way of making decisions, and a leader may adopt it in one situation and leave it in another.

It also differs from transformational leadership, a style in which the leader seeks to raise followers’ ambition and their sense of meaning in their work, which is a matter apart from the way a decision is taken. A transformational leader may decide alone, and a participative leader may raise nobody’s ambition. The two meet when the team is involved in decisions about what the leader wants to achieve. Starting instead from what the team needs in order to work and to develop is the stance of Servant Leadership.

How a leader trains in asking questions

Participation depends on the kind of question asked. A question such as “Don’t you think the first schedule is better?” asks for agreement, not for an opinion, while “What worries you about each of the two schedules?” asks for an opinion. A leader who is used to leading questions needs training in open ones.

Help comes from coaching, which rests on a relationship of limited duration in which the coach works by asking questions rather than by prescribing answers. A manager who receives it notices when the manager asks in order to hear and when the manager asks in order to confirm a decision already taken.

How a leader gathers what the team has to say

One tool is a regular meeting with each employee, in which the employee can say what might not be said before the group, which is the one on one meeting. Another is a declared channel for receiving ideas, with a route, an owner and a known period for reply, the suggestion system, which helps when the leader wants ideas from beyond the immediate team. In both, gathering what people say is not enough: it has to be reported back to those who said it. If the team is thought unlikely to speak frankly before the leader, opinions can be gathered through an anonymous form before the meeting, provided the team knows how they will be used.

When a leader departs from what was heard

A leader may listen to the team and then decide against what the majority of its members wanted, because a consideration the team cannot see governs the decision, such as a budget or a commitment to a client. That is within the leader’s right as long as the reason is declared. The leader says: “I heard the view of most of you, and I decided otherwise because the client required this, and here is what I can offer you in return.”

What destroys trust is not the departure but silence about it. If an employee concludes that the employee’s opinion was not heard, the employee stops offering it the next time.

How to tell whether participation is genuine

It is not measured by the number of meetings but by what became of what was said in them. Suppose a team gave its manager 12 proposals in one quarter. Five were taken as they stood, 4 were amended and taken, and 3 were not taken. The share of proposals that influenced the decision is (5 + 4) ÷ 12 = 75%. What matters as much is that none of the twelve is left without a reply, so that the owners of the three that were not taken know why. If all twelve are answered, the response rate is 100% and participation is genuine even if the rate of acceptance is low. If only 6 are answered (50%) and the leader says nothing about the rest, participation wears away quarter after quarter.

Another sign is for the leader to ask the team after a decision: did you feel that your opinion was taken into account? If more than half answer “no”, participation has been confined to the meeting itself, and the leader should check whether the questions were asked after the decision had already been made.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.