How to Create High-Quality Team Decisions With High Commitment: Focus on Interests, Not Positions
Effective teams make decisions that create high-quality solutions and high commitment to implementing the solutions. But focusing prematurely on solutions often leads to lower quality decisions and less commitment.
How Teams Undermine their Decision-Making Effectiveness
Have you ever been in a meeting where one team member tries to get other team members to buy into a solution? When the team member pitches their solution, another member says that solution won’t work and proposes a different solution. Then another member dismisses the second member’s idea and proposes a third solution. The team members continue to propose solutions until the team reaches an impasse or agrees on a compromise that pleases no one. In either case, the team is likely to end up with a lower-quality decision without sufficient commitment to implement successfully.
How does this happen? Solving problems effectively as a team requires understanding the difference between positions and interests. Interests are the needs and concerns that people have regarding a particular problem or situation.1 Positions are the solutions that people develop to meet their interests. In other words, people’s interests lead them to advocate for a particular solution or position. In situations where the stakes are high and team members have strong views they often advocate for a position because they want their view to prevail. This is called a unilateral control approach. This also makes them less curious about other team members’ interests, which leads to a team meeting of competing solutions.
If you lead a team, you may be unintentionally contributing to this problem. Have you ever told a team member, “Don’t come with a problem unless you have a solution”? If you have, the team member will likely follow your direction. They will likely come to the meeting with a position that considers either only their interests or, in any case, not all the team members’ interests. This is one way the team scenario I described above gets started. It’s predictable and below I’ll show you how to prevent it.
The reason it’s important to focus on interests instead of positions is that people’s positions are often in conflict even when their interests are compatible. By focusing on interests, you make it possible to agree on a solution or to solve a problem even when people have conflicting positions.
Here’s a simple example. If you’re part of a team buying a car and you say you want a Honda Accord and another team member says she wants a Toyota Prius, these are positions. If I ask you, “What is it about buying a Honda Accord that’s important to you?,” you will probably answer by describing your interests—the needs you are trying to meet. You might say you want a Honda Accord because it’s a reliable car, with low repair costs, and high resale value. These are the needs you are trying to meet. If I ask the team member what it is about a Toyota Prius that’s important to her, she may say she wants a car that gets good gas mileage and that she can easily maneuver in tight spaces. If each of you agree that the other’s needs are reasonable to consider, then your joint task becomes finding a vehicle that meets both sets of interests.
Notice the difference between positions and interests. Positions are fixed. They tell you exactly what to decide; in this case it’s either a Honda Accord or a Toyota Prius. Interests are more general, so they expand the possible number of solutions. In this example, there are many cars that are reliable, have low repair costs, high resale value, get good gas mileage and have a short turning radius. Any car that meets these interests would be acceptable to both of the team members.
Because teams are often trying to develop solutions rather than choosing between predefined alternatives (like two cars), identifying interests also enables them to be creative about how to meet the set of agreed-upon interests.
Four Steps to Building High-Quality Decisions with High Commitment
Leaders often ask me how to get commitment from their team. The answer is simple. People commit to decisions that meet their interests. If you understand and craft a solution that addresses their interests, team members will naturally commit. Here are four steps for creating commitment and high-quality decisions by focusing on interests:
Step 1: Identify interests. Ask team members to complete this sentence as many times as possible: “Regardless of the specifics of any solution we develop, it needs to be one that . . .” In this way, the team is building a single list of interests. If people start identifying positions instead of interests, ask them, “What is it about your solution that’s important to you?” This helps them identify their underlying interests.
Step 2: Agree on interests to consider in the solution. In this step the team clarifies what each interest means and reaches agreement on which interests they’ll consider in developing solutions. One way to ask this question is, “Are there any interests that someone thinks we should not take into account when developing a solution?” “Take into account” doesn’t mean that everyone agrees that a given interest is important, just that everyone sees it as relevant. In the end the team won’t necessarily be able to craft a solution that meets all the relevant interests, though that would be the ideal outcome. At the end of this step, your team will have a single list of the interests that an ideal solution would address. Note that this is very different than asking the team to develop a list of pros and cons, which invites team members to take positions by suggesting pros and cons that support their solution.
Step 3: Craft solutions that meet the interests. Now your team is ready to generate solutions that meet as many of the interests as possible—ideally all of them. At this step you can say something like, “Let’s come up with some possible solutions that meet all our interests. We’re not committing to any of these solutions yet, we’re just getting them on the table.” The team begins to identify possible solutions. This is a time for members to play off and build on each other’s ideas, seeking solutions that incorporate as many interests as possible. If you can’t find a solution that meets all the agreed-upon interests, consider whether all the proposed solutions have a common unnecessary assumption embedded in them. For example, if every proposed solution assumes that the work has to be performed only by full-time employees, try relaxing that assumption and see if the team can now generate solutions that meet all the interests. If this doesn’t help, then the team can prioritize or assign weights to the different interests to find a solution that addresses the most important ones.
Step 4: Select a solution and implement it. Using this approach doesn’t guarantee that the team will reach a decision that meets everyone’s interests. It does, however, increase the chance that you will find a solution that everyone can support and implement.
Are you thinking, “This sounds good, but it will take a lot more time”? If so, a lot more time than what? Reaching decisions quickly that are low-quality and have insufficient commitment for implementing leads to more problems and more meetings to solve them. The systems thinking saying here is “go slow to go fast.” As my father, who was an engineer, liked to say to me, “Rog, if you don’t have time to do it right the first time, how will you find time the second time?”
Using Team Meeting Time Efficiently to Build High-Quality Decisions and High Commitment
Remember when I asked above if you have ever told a team member, “Don’t come with a problem unless you have a solution”? If you want to save valuable team time by having a team member develop a high-quality solution that gains team commitment, you can tell your team member this: “Don’t come only with a problem; come to the team meeting with a proposed solution that you’re confident considers the interests of the whole team.”
Ask that team member to be curious about the other team members’ interests and to propose a solution that meets these interests. Tell them to come to the team meeting prepared to share not only the proposed solution, but also how the solution takes into consideration each of the team members’ interests. This means that before the meeting, the team member will need to talk with each of the other team members, saying something like, “I’m trying to address the issue of X and want to propose a solution at the team meeting that ideally will meet everyone’s interests. So, can you tell me what interests you have that you want met in any solution I develop?”
At the team meeting, the member with the proposal can say something like, “I’ve talked with each of you about the interests that need to be met to solve X. I think I’ve got a solution that works for all of us. Let me lay out the solution and describe how I think it meets each of the interests you mentioned. Then let’s find out if I missed anything.”
Creating high-quality team decisions with high commitment to implementation is not magic. By being transparent, curious, and focusing on interests your team can consistently achieve these results.
This article draws from The Skilled Facilitator: A Comprehensive Resource for Consultants, Facilitators, Coaches, and Trainers, 3rd ed. and from Smart Leaders, Smarter Teams, both by Roger Schwarz.
1 The phrase focus on interests, not positions was made popular by Roger Fischer and William Ury in their book Getting To Yes: Negotiating Without Giving In. The concept of focusing on interests was developed by Mary Parker Follett in the early 1900s and appears in the book Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett.
published June 2025
