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Empower your team by creating a culture of distributed decision making

If you want to positively affect code delivery metrics, improve quality, and give your team opportunities to grow, then keep reading.

Why is empowering your team important?

Your team are on the ground "in the thick of it" day to day, and they are therefore best placed (read: better than you) to make quick, localised decisions. 

The last thing you want is for your team to get stuck because they need to talk to you, slowing down the development process, and potentially invoking the negative side effects of context switching.

 You may be stuck in meetings and now your team are stuck waiting for you to finish. Not ideal.

What helps my team to feel empowered?

You can help your team to feel empowered by providing them with the contextual awareness they need to make a decision without you.

Arming them with the necessary contextual awareness keeps them unblocked, and enables them to make decisions that aren’t based on local factors alone.

What are the benefits of distributed decision making?

Your team are able to react to situations more quickly and independently. They are able to make better decisions too. Without context from you, they might be considering things from a relatively narrow perspective.

The longevity and quality of solutions is improved by distributing the decision to the experts who know what they are doing.

Additionally, you empower them to speak to stakeholders directly to solve problems as they occur in the development process. The lack of communication between teams is a common reason that projects are severely delayed or fail to deliver the expected outcomes.

Talking to stakeholders directly fosters an environment of autonomy and provides team members with the opportunity to connect with people around the business. They also practice skills that will benefit them in the future when they are running the show. Win-win.

Are there are any non-functional benefits of information sharing?

If you share information appropriately with your team, they will be able to make distributed decisions. Making decisions without involving you as leader will cause them to feel more autonomous, and happier as a result. They will be more engaged. All whilst reducing code delivery times and improving quality of deliverables.

Least of all, you’ll have more time because you won’t be constantly interrupted for things that don’t need you and you can spend your time on more valuable activities.

What are practical steps I can take to distribute decisions to my team in their day-to-day work?

Here are a few ways to enable this distributed decision making environment within your team:

  • Share information freely and transparently with your team and avoid holding back unless absolutely necessary (e.g. sensitive HR issues).
  • Explicitly call out clear steps on getting unstuck before or as work begins. The most important thing is usually who they need to talk to if they get stuck or need more info, e.g. "If you get stuck, talk to Sarah over in the Credit Cards team. She wrote this code and knows the most about it." 
  • Inform your team of anything that could impact work they are carrying out, or of likely changes in business direction. An impending change to business objectives may mean they decide to implement the sticky tape solution, but without the right context, they can't make the right call.
  • I regularly and explicitly tell people that they can and should make the decision, e.g. "Here's what I think, but you are free to make the decision you feel is best."
  • In some cases, I will even go a bit further "You make the decision. Do what you think is right and I'll support it." I'm setting the scene: I'm saying "it's okay for you to make the decisions, you don't need me." After all, why hire a person to do a job and not let them do it?
  • Don't be the judge, jury and executioner of software architecture design within the team. The team need to make their own mistakes and if you are seen as the guardian of all code and design choice, then you'll never get good at distributed decision making because all decisions effectively run through you. Vetoing all changes or being a point of recurring friction in the PR approval process is more likely to work against you than for you. But, that's a post for another time..
My list is far from complete. 

What else could you do to encourage or improve distributed decision making within your team?

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