You Own Your Role, We Own The Outcome

[Corey Ford at Point C]

This and its predecessor, One Consultative Decision Maker Per Lane, go beyond being sound management advice into almost being a manifesto for how management should work.

If people in your team stick to their lanes entirely, a lot can go wrong:

“The gaps between those lanes become the source of risk, and without a shared sense of ownership, those gaps go unaddressed until it is too late.

No one dropped the ball. But the ball fell between them.”

As Corey points out, roles and decision rights do matter a lot. If you don’t empower people to make real decisions in their respective lanes of responsibility and expertise, your team will grind to a halt (and, if you’re ultimately in charge, everyone will resent you). I’ve been in those teams and it’s always counterproductive; often that’s because there’s someone who wants to make all the decisions. By undercutting people’s decisions, they end up undermining the work of the team and making it impossible to make real progress.

But you also can’t encourage people to put blinkers on. Everyone needs to feel responsibility over the team’s end result — which also means they need to feel ownership over it. I’ve been there too: places where people want to be heads down and just look at a particular piece of code, for example. It doesn’t work on small teams. Maybe there are companies out there, really big ones with cubicles and campuses, where it makes sense. I’ve never worked in one.

There’s a productive tension here, obviously. You can’t go fully one way or the other. But if you treat a team as a community, and the team leader as the facilitator of that community, you can navigate these nuances more easily.

I wanted to share this piece because it ties together so many important ideas: a culture of open feedback, ensuring every voice is heard, framing the work as a learning problem, and leading with vulnerability. I like to create teams that embody these values, and work in places that share my belief that they are important.

So much of this is about trust in people. Trust in the expertise on your team to make sound decisions; trust that the collective can produce great work; trust that when you raise an issue or give feedback in good faith it will be received constructively. I think you have to start with trust as the default — and then vote with your feet if you find it isn’t there.

[Link]