In my opinion this advice is quite fatuous, because it skips over the actual difficult bit, which is figuring out what to do when you have a problem that can't simply be decided by the person directly responsible for the the work, either due to complexity/scale of the problem, or because that person is not capable of making the decision.
If you don't think they're capable of listening to the same things as you are, taking into account team guidance, and coming to a reasonable decision, why would you trust them to implement something?
If they're not getting the same inputs to their decisions as you are, why are you hamstringing them?
And if they're not capable of understanding the inputs to their decisions, why are you keeping them around?
> If you don't think they're capable of listening to the same things as you are, taking into account team guidance, and coming to a reasonable decision, why would you trust them to implement something?
This doesn’t seem realistic to me. Division of labor also implies division of decisions. Mature individuals and teams will acknowledge when there are decisions they’re not able to make, and will refer them to the relevant teams.
An obvious example of this is legal: it hardly ever makes sense to leave a legal decision to a software developer or development team. But similar logic can apply to product management decisions, customer success, security, etc.
How is that an example? Legal is just an input. A mature individual is going to heed the advice from legal, most certainly, but legal isn't making the final decision. Legal doesn't know anything about all of the other constraints, like customer need and technical need. If they did, they wouldn't be working as legal council, they'd be doing the job we're talking about.
So, we're right back at the previous comment:
- If you don't think they're capable of listening to the same things as you are, taking into account team guidance, and coming to a reasonable decision, why would you trust them to implement something?
- If they're not getting the same inputs to their decisions as you are, why are you hamstringing them?
- And if they're not capable of understanding the inputs to their decisions, why are you keeping them around?
An input that regularly mandates choices. The idea that an engineering team gets to make choices with legal consequences using legal as just an "input" is not consistent with any large company I've ever worked at.
> If you don't think they're capable of listening to the same things as you are, taking into account team guidance, and coming to a reasonable decision, why would you trust them to implement something?
Because different people have different skills and knowledge. As I said previously, division of labor also implies division of decisions.
People are not interchangeable or fungible components.
Your job as a leader isn't necessarily to make the decision, just to be sure that the decision was made.