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 all management agrees and approves before moving forward. This could be in regards to anything from a company philosophy, event details, or the website you’re building. Think of consensus-based as a “big tent” that includes a large group of employees coming from diverse backgrounds. Or it may be that your organization is part of a larger umbrella organization. Regardless, a consensus-based organization, like these, strives for collaboration, democratic leadership, and agreement among its team members.

This type of organization is focused on its mission and places responsibility on its employees and lay leaders to amplify its message. The mission is where all aspects of marketing return. Along the way, we ask, “does this reflect our mission?”

For consensus-based organizations, it’s important to confirm the accuracy and tone of of your 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 each professional prior to sending, it will go through multiple rounds of approval prior to sending. Each item in the newsletter will be checked for style, tone, overall message, editing, imagery, relevancy, and adherence to the overall mission.

This type of questioning, problem-solving and agreement extends into community-building initiatives, social, cultural and educational programs, community resources, spiritual and experiential programs, Israel 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.

There is a popular proverb that goes, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” For consensus-based organizations, the approval process can be quite long. However, the benefit is that each movement forward is a collective step and one that fully represents the whole.

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

• Establish and agree on the goals of the project
• Incorporate tochacha into your work, which is the love of constructive criticism
• Simple solutions can be good solutions
• Get content pre-approved before implementing
• Define what needs to be measured early on
• Decide timeframes and incorporate approval milestones
• Decide who must be involved in approval process
• Provide edits in batches, rather than pieces, for faster productivity

As always, My Jewish Website is here for you! We can help you achieve all this and much more when you give us a call. 

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