Decision-making and leadership
The Blackmill book club recently finished reading Will Larson’s excellent book, The Engineering Executive’s Primer. I enjoyed it for a number of reasons and have already had reason to refer back to it. But one element I found difficult was the characterisation of leadership styles as different forms of decision-making. Policy, consensus, and conviction are all valid decision-making approaches that offer varying degrees of usefulness depending on the circumstances. But leadership is not just about how you make decisions. Nor is it simply having the authority to make decisions.
Leadership is many things, but in the context of making decisions, it is making a call that gets buy-in, that promotes follow-through, that is accepted, and that achieves something.
You need to be empowered to make the decision, and not be afraid of taking the fall. The first needs institutional support. The second being held to account if the decision goes poorly.
To make a good decision, it is important to gather the right people, to ask the right questions, to have the right context. You can't veto the team too often, because dictatorship will deflate the team. Many times, you need to get support from the wider team, to actually make the change stick. Hearing out perspectives and proposals lets people buy in and commit to the final outcome.
You can make any decision you want, or write it in a policy, but it doesn't mean people will follow through. Achieving the latter? That is leadership.