As a leader the intent is to move towards getting closer to the finish line. As humans we tend to have high egos and try to ensure our choices and decisions stick. Affect is that folks actually doing the work don’t feel as motivated about doing it when the choice wasn’t exactly their own. So, it is critical to:
- Take time to understand the choices which team is presenting.
- Understand the pros and cons of the choices and if the difference between your choice vs what the team intends to do isn’t great then its better to listen and do what the team intends. Even if the choice has some issues unless critical, the team will learn from their choices and improve in their decision making down the road.
- If the choices that the team proposes have significant risks such as time to delivery or not encompassing needs of stake holders than time should be taken to explain to the team the need for a different path and thereby reach a compromise in interest of getting some traction.
An example:
My team wanted to build a fancy language editor to enable ease of use in one of our internal applications. The fancy editor would have taken a lot more development time which would have pushed our delivery further out. Had to work with the team to get a minimal viable product out quickly so we can reap benefits of the functionality but also create a strategic project with goal to make the editor easy to use.