Leadership and Decision Making
by Jim Highsmith, 2 August 2011 | Agile Leadership
This post is from Jim Highsmith by Jim Highsmith. Click here to see the original post in full.
A good leader has to be a visionary, a teacher, a motivator, a facilitator, and other things, but she must also be a decision maker. The same is true of lead engineers for technical issues. So the question becomes, at what point does a leader’s decision making damage self-organization? First, when the team loses respect for the leader. But what causes loss of respect? The answer: when the manager begins making unilateral or arbitrary decisions. The more unilateral decisions, the less participation from the team, and the less likely the decisions are to be effectively implemented.Every team and situation are different, so there isn’t a quantitative answer to the question of how many unilateral decisions are too many. However, even though presenting absolute numbers risks misinterpretation, I think the following guidelines may help define appropriate “levels” of leader decision making that will continue to foster self-organization. This rough guide is one unilateral decision every month or two, three to four decisions per month with team involvement, and then delegate the hundreds of other decisions to the team. In practice, few good managers make completely unilateral decisions—they normally talk issues over with at least key members of their team. But occasionally there is a need to get things moving by making a unilateral decision. In that same vein, it is appropriate for leaders to make certain decisions with team participation, but if...read more
