Leadership style plays an important role in software development team culture. There’s the traditional “Command and Order” approach, where a centralized authority dictates tasks and decisions. On the other side, there’s the more modern approach of “Empower the Team,” emphasizing collaboration, autonomy, and shared decision-making. We all know that we want to empower the team and there is no doubt about it given the benefits, it doesn’t mean that “Command and Order” doesn’t come to play at certain times. Let’s explore these two.
At a crisis situation, or regular operation when an incident happens, quick decision and clear direction is essential to get team to respond quick and get issues resolved. It is not time to experiment and test team members’ abilities though it is very good opportunities for team to learn.
The drawback on this is whenever something happens, team always look up to one or two key persons to give directions and couldn’t or are not confident enough to come up with their own resolutions in a timely manner. It is important to allow team members to grow in handling this type of situations. For incidents that severities not very high, the key people of the team should try to step back a little bit even though still will be in the loop but give other people a chance to resolve issues on their own.
Another time that team need more directions or guidance instead of being left alone is at early stage of a project. So team won’t be wasting time and go on a wrong direction. But again, it depends on if this type of going on a wrong direction can be considered a step toward learning. Always giving team directions one will make the key people become bottleneck of the team operation, two it doesn’t help team to grow in the long term.
Empowering team not only allow team to grow. The decisions made by them could be better because the people who are closer to the work details tends to have more information than others about the particular work. It also increase job satisfaction when team members can make their own decisions. Letting team to grow is the only way that team will be able to adapt fast to changes.
However, there are pitfalls with empowered team culture. There could result in indecision when too many different opinions coming from the team. There needs to be a balance between autonomy and someone providing guidance and direction.
For the same reason, when communication is open while there is no proper structures on decision making, overly empowered team may face challenges in coordinating efforts.
The things to watch out for is also leaders’ personalities. There are leaders that leaning more toward command-control type of style because their own personalities. It is hard for team to push back on that in that case. Though it is team culture, but leaders play an important role.
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