Why Community Should Be Involved in Decision-Making

Active leadership involves taking the lead from behind. It means that supervisors give community/team members the power to share ideas, make comments, and influence their work toward the objectives they are tasked with achieving. Why modern leaders use participatory decision-making? 1) Build community resilience: Community are consulted about potential solutions by leaders. With this, everyone can elaborate on issues and come up with solutions within the given structure. Strategic planning requires the community to be involved in finding a solution, whereas a crisis may call for top-down solutions. 2) Build social assets: When leaders and the community work together for the common good, trust and confidence grow. As communities grow more diverse, the demand for social capital and participative, collaborative decision-making also grows. If members and stakeholders feel that they were given a voice in the decision, they are more likely to accept it. 3) Ensure cooperation with the provided guidelines: Due to discrimination, marginalized voices are less likely to be heard, and community members who are unable to attend are completely unheard. Regardless of whether a meeting is conducted or not, online discussion tools promote the greatest ideas impartially and enable participation. 4) Improve authenticity and transparency: An impartial method focuses participants on the issue and its solution, rather than the procedure. When people feel that the decision-making process is unjust, they are less likely to participate in the process or support the outcome. However, participants are more likely to commit to, support, and work toward that choice if they feel the process was fair. 5) Make smarter decisions: Many of the issues that hinder community systems can be addressed more effectively in large, diverse groups. The group needs to be large, varied, and knowledgeable to be able to make better decisions than the experts. The group members must be allowed to make their own decisions before combining their unique ideas into collective decisions. These groups work best on difficult problems if everyone can agree on the goal and the challenge is presented in a way that doesn't assume a particular perspective. Conclusion: Those who are prepared to engage with their stakeholders or community, pose challenging questions, and work cooperatively and collaboratively to co-discover community-informed solutions are the real leaders in our times.