Great writeup. Consensus is important, but total dependence on agreement can water down solutions and lead to gridlock. Plus, settling on a solution (however modified) that one person has advocated from the start helps them own it. So long as mistakes aren't lorded over anyone, this is a great way to help people develop professionally; you learn best from your mistakes, and from the initiatives you spearhead.
In such ways, let's say there's a team of 10 people working on a product. How do you avoid the "too many cooks spoils the meal" problem? Jane wants things open-source, Reggie wants the problem to be super-simple and will sacrifice features for simplicity, Joe wants infinite configurability... Without someone to over-rule the group and set the definite course, you could spend days/weeks/months along this track. You can make good arguments for any of these things, but there is no real "right" answer after infinite arguing sometimes. It comes down to what is best for the company, and people can disagree on that all the time.
In my (granted, limited) experience, I've preferred having someone set a definite course than have to deal with a group-think version of a decision.
This is where a mission and values come into play. Leadership sets the tone and provides a framework (people should have input during this process of course), then gets out of the way so its people can make their own decisions inside that model. You make it safer for people to take risks this way, and try something that not everyone might agree upon.
I totally agree with having lively discussion within a framework defined by the leadership. But it seems that the mission and values are usually at a pretty high level - so high that they don't necessarily help in coming up with a single solution. It still seems that someone ??in a non-leadership role?? needs to be empowered to make the final decision - and to know when to make it. Maybe the framework you're thinking of, while influenced by the higher-level mission and values, has the "who" and "when" built in. And it certainly wouldn't have to be the same "who" all the time.
"And it certainly wouldn't have to be the same "who" all the time."
Totally agree. And this is the hard part for leaders -- letting their people make big decisions, because the mistakes will be attributed to the team leader, and not their teams. As it should. But great leaders will make that situation a reality, otherwise you have a bunch of unmotivated people working for you who will eventually look for a job elsewhere that empowers them to grow into larger roles.
So leadership has to guide the process, and occasionally just decide. But hopefully only occasionally.
The problem with that process is that it ends up being half-assed.
"Yeah I value your opinion, all of your opinions, I'd like to hear your ideas... but we're not going to implement any of them. I like to feel good about being a good leader who listens to my minions. "
or
"Yeah I listened to one of your ten ideas, and it ended up sucking, lets ignore the facts that that idea had dependencies and contingencies on the other nine ideas in order to be amazing"
I rather prefer that the leader took a role that dictated the vision of the product and these days I prefer that particular leader to be the founder and/or CEO. Also hopefully someone who is part of the implementation (preferably code).
I'm not to that extreme because you need buy-in to make things work. But.... The problem with group think and committees is that everyone has a veto. The problem then is it is very hard to get out of Pareto Efficient [1] situations where advancing the group has to come at someone's expense. In these cases, someone owning the entire result needs to force the decision.
