Important Decision? Agree on How to Make it First
October 16, 2025 | By David M. Wagner
“I didn’t realize that’s what this meeting was about.”
Ugh. As the meeting facilitator, those words were hard to hear.
An important stakeholder – who was not expected to attend – showed up for a vision workshop after all.
But because they had been less engaged previously, they entered the conversation without the context shared by most other attendees.
And I had failed to properly lay the groundwork to get everyone on the same page.
If you want agreement on an important decision, start by getting your team to agree on how the decision will be made.
Having a shared framework about how you’ll make the decision means spending less time trying to get on the same page and more time having constructive conversations.
Here are examples of successful approaches to getting stakeholders aligned to make tough decisions a bit easier.
Communicating the Plan to Rebrand
A nonprofit, recognizing its name no longer reflected its mission, set out to rebrand.
Their first attempt hit a snag when several stakeholders shared that they felt they were brought into the decision-making process too late.
So they reset.
The leadership team began again, this time by communicating:
The reasons for the rebrand,
The process they planned to follow, including how they would collect input from stakeholders,
The factors they would use in the decision, and
Who would ultimately choose the new brand name.
That new process is still underway, but already the organization’s stakeholders – who felt left out the first time around – have positively engaged in the rebranding.
Setting Parameters for a Major Decision
A client was considering some significant strategic changes: whether to wind down, merge with another nonprofit, or continue with their current structure.
As you might expect, there were strong feelings among the board about the organization’s future.
But by the time the executive team presented its recommendation to the rest of the board, rather than contention, there was broad acceptance.
How? It helped that we wrote out a plan at the start of the project to lay out:
The goals of any restructuring,
The options under consideration, and
How each option would be evaluated.
Everyone had a chance to weigh in from the beginning, so by the end, the recommendation was not a surprise. And the decision was much easier to reach.
Team Building with Assigned Reading
A colleague was helping a corporate team to improve their relationships and performance.
In preparation for some candid conversations they planned, my colleague asked the participants to all read a book about teamwork.
That shared homework gave the team a shared language for their discussions and a framework of ideas to choose whether, and how, to adopt themselves. Making their decisions all the easier.
When your team has a big decision to make, the first choice to make is how you’ll approach it. You’ll have an easier time building commitment to a decision with a shared framework, process, or language to guide your stakeholders. And if you need help creating that shared context, let’s chat.