How can any team improve it's ability to listen, communicate and reach consensus?

Developing a listening, consensus-building style

Active listening, supporting and building the ideas of others, focused discussion of problems, efficient processing of meeting agenda items - all these behaviours tend to be supported in principle by people in teams, but often they don't use them very often! By taking some time to work with a facilitator, capturing success and learning from it, teams can improve dramatically. Achieving true consensus, particularly in a multi-disciplinary team, is a key marker of performance and progress. This can be a real challenge, but a very worthwhile one.

Case Studies:

Firstly, a team must acknowledge and understand its weaknesses and needs in these areas. This could be achieved in a variety of ways. Encouraging the team to review its performance, say at the end of a meeting, may easily highlight some areas for improvement. Another method would be to put the team through a management game, or team exercise, and have an observer note down the key behaviours that happen.

Secondly, the team must set some goals, and some objectives. This may be fairly straightforward. Aspects of listening - an aim of one person talking at any one time - is likely to be an obvious, uncontroversial issue. There may be other goals - more participation from all, building on others' ideas rather than instant criticism - that can be agreed to.

The third, and most vital component is monitoring and review. Formal team process reviews (see here for a great technique) will identify how well the team did against its objectives. Yet almost as important is to generate an atomosphere of mutual observation, where it's 'OK' for anyone to pick up minor transgressions of agreed principles.