Credit: Joe Groove

Recently, someone asked me for my “Leadership philosophy”. My initial reaction was to panic, but after taking a deep breath and a bit of time to think, I came up with this answer:

“My job is to make it easier for people to make good decisions.”

What does that mean?

Firstly – that my job is not to make decisions. Sometimes (often!) it is, but it’s important to think about when someone else should be able to make the decision and how to change it for next time.

What do people need to make decisions?

  • Context: What is the information around the decision they need to understand? As you rise up the org chart, you end up with a broad amount of context,so think about what you need to be distilling and passing on.
  • Scope / Responsibility: This is clarity about the scope of the decisions people can make, and what they are responsible for.
  • Timeframe: What timeframe is being optimized for.

Local / focused decisions can help teams move faster in the short term, but have higher costs over time – e.g. optimizing for features over infrastructure that would make more features easy. Shifting this requires:

  • Enough shared context such that people can identify possible overlap.
  • Clarity about how and when a broader scope can make sense.
  • Understanding of where it’s critical to just deliver vs where it’s possible to justify longer investments (i.e product market fit vs iteration).