Empowerment

During a workshop I recently attended, a team lead mentioned that he loved when his team members wanted to own a process or product. He himself didn’t feel a need to own anything, really. By giving his team members the responsibility they ask for, he feels that he empowers them to give their best work.

Strong-minded individuals will come to him and tell what work needs to be done. And he will ask questions and then let them do their work as best they can from there.

Empowered dysfunction

While the intentions are good–and definitely empowering for individuals–this leadership approach causes team dysfunction in the long term. When multiple people set their own direction–or when a project manager dictates plans for many–there’s nothing preventing the team from pulling in conflicting directions.

If the team has no clear goal to work towards, individuals will end up fighting over the work that needs to be done. Project managers will be frustrated that IC’s are never available and that there is no predictability of development velocity. There will be no principled approach to bug-fixing vs feature development.

What doesn’t kill you leaves a scar

I’ve experienced this approach gone wrong previously in my career. I’m stubborn and so is my colleague. Our boss didn’t have a strong sense of the subject matter, or maybe just tried to be hands-off in order to not be micro managing. The effect, unfortunately, was huge fights over what could have been simple decisions.

I didn’t budge. And in the end, my colleague ended up finding another job. But not before enormous fights that ended with me home sick with stress for a couple of months and my colleague frustrated out of his mind that no one was listening to him.

If our boss had stepped in, we could have resolved the issue much faster. And definitely before it turned nasty.

I’m not saying that all teams where leaders don’t set direction ends up in the kind of dysfunction I just mentioned. Some might just squander their time and opportunity. Great teams might end up being downsized. Big bets fail, and entire initiatives may unfairly be seen as fundamentally flawed.

Leaders set the direction

But it doesn’t have to be that way, of course. A team is best when it is empowered to make the best decisions it can, in pursuit of a common goal. The job of the leader is to convey that goal.