I find that playing the “I’m the leader, this is the decision, go forth and do it” card is not fun and almost always wrought with unintended consequences.

A notable exception is teams that fall back to working in their own specialized lanes1 and throwing things over the wall. Really, the issue is throwing things over the wall, working in your lane isn’t inherently harmful2. Playing the leader card and insisting folks work across specialization in their lane or closely with a teammate whose skills complement their own has fixed more things than it complicated. More specifically, the complications were the kind of difficulties a high-functioning team would face anyway, i.e., “high-quality problems”.

Now I wonder what other scenarios justify playing the power dynamic or “I’m not your cool uncle” card to escape an unproductive local maximum.

  1. e.g. back-end, front-end, mobile, etc. ↩
  2. Assuming you’re adept at communicating progress and avoiding rabbit holes ↩