In a recent conversation with Clinton Moloney of the Trium Group, he highlighted the distinction between agreement and alignment whenever a decision must be made in a working group or professional relationship:
Agreement means that all parties get their first choice, which is usually difficult and time-consuming to obtain.
Alignment means that all parties can fully support the choice that is ultimately made, a condition that can be much easier to obtain (under the right circumstances.)
If we consider the importance and risk of a given decision to ourselves relative to the importance and risk of the same decision to others, the result is a frontier that separates the less-important, lower-risk decisions that merely require alignment from the more-important, higher-risk decisions that require agreement.
A dilemma is that some very important, high-risk decisions must be made under stressful conditions with imperfect information and limited time. These are the circumstances that can lead to excessive conflict as participants struggle to reach agreement, the abandonment of agreed-upon processes and a overreliance on directive authority, or a failure to make any decision at all.
The solution for groups and colleagues who want to make more important decisions more effectively (and with less effort and strife) is to extend the frontier. This involves increasing trust among all parties and insuring that individuals feel that their personal goals and the goals of others' are mutually dependent.
The process of creating a shared sense of commitment in a group or relationship is highly complex, of course, but it starts with building trust--and it's essential to note that trust isn't a binary quality that we possess or lack. As described by Trium's Clinton Moloney in the conversation I note above, trust is motive + reliability + competence. Or as noted by Charles Green in a follow-up comment to that post, trust is (credibility + reliability + intimacy), divided by self-orientation. Even more simply, we may distinguish between trust in intentions and trust in judgment.
The key is recognizing that our trust in others (and their trust in us) is constructed from a number of different components, and when we sense trust is lacking, we need to be as specific as possible in identifying the cause of the deficit so that we can address it effectively.
It's also important to note that trust grows from a range of sources, and this can vary widely by culture. For example, Erin Meyer, an American teaching at INSEAD, notes that in some cultures trust is generally built through successful task accomplishment in business-related activities, while in other cultures personal relationships and shared experiences play a more significant role. The United States is the most task-oriented country in Meyer's framework, and in my experience this means that Americans often miss opportunities to build trust by connecting interpersonally, even if just in a few moments of small talk at the beginning of a meeting.
The more trust that exists among the parties participating in the process, the further the frontier can be extended, so that alignment is sufficient to address increasingly important and high-risk decisions.
For Further Reading
Comment: Charles Green on Trust
Huddle Up! (Building Group Cohesion)
Leadership, Decision-Making and Emotion Management
Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups (Vanessa Urch Druskat and Steven Wolff, Harvard Business Review, 2001)
Revised February 2019.
