This is very much context and culture dependent. For example, in some civil services, managers never get into trouble for saying no, as they can spin a no as being good stewards of public funds. Saying yes is far riskier and requires either top down direction or group consensus, or both.
The hardest thing about making decisions is accepting that some people don’t want that responsibility. If you are willing to make decisions, and have a decent track record and can justify them in a manner acceptable to your organization, you can go far.
I hadn’t been a manager long when two of my staff came to tell me of a customer problem. They summarized the situation, offered alternatives, and a recommendation. Then waited.
I tried to look pensive as if considering what they were saying, while all the while thinking that their assessment was cogent and their recommendation spot on. Honestly, I couldn’t figure out why they were there. It took me a bit to realize they needed me to okay it: I was the manager, so I had to take responsibility, they didn’t want that.
OK, let’s do that, I said, and if they went, happy. One of them became a very good manager some time later when they decided they did want that responsibility.
I’d argue a major role of a manager is to make decisions and take responsibility for them - it’s not employees don’t “want to”, that’s usually not their job. Everyone unilaterally making their own decisions creates an inconsistent mess.
To me, it sounds like what they did is what good employees should do which is consider the problem
and present it in a way that made the decision trivially easy for you. You can still overrule it if it’s not reasonable.
If you want to say “use your initiative if X” then fine, but the scope of that should be reasonably clear. It’s always a bit of a balancing act, of course.
When it comes to decision making, managers span from people who are too willing to make decisions without a full understanding the situation and detail, often to the detriment of their team and customers who they are distanced from, to those who outright refuse to make decisions. There are lots of bad managers.
> Everyone unilaterally making their own decisions creates an inconsistent mess.
Nobody is talking about people unilaterally making their own decisions. We are talking about intelligent people discussing among each other and reaching a consensus together without having someone else tell them what to think.
> You can still overrule it if it’s not reasonable.
If anything, this would be someone unilaterally making their own decision!
The manager is not some sort of superhuman that alone knows better than the rest of the employees together. Maybe the manager has more information than the rest of the employees, but then the manager can share that and the other employees can revise their decision in light of the new information.
> We are talking about intelligent people discussing among each other and reaching a consensus together without having someone else tell them what to think.
You are assuming here that people are competent, willing and able to cooperate, caring about the interest of the company, and are able to act on their decision. It's great but it's an ideal scenario.
Rules and top down approaches usually are not designed for cases like this, assume now that the group has too few senior people so they don't really know what they are doing, some people that don't really care about the company any more ("I have been bitten too many times so I just collect my paycheck"), some people that have trouble communicating together (due to incompatible characters, timezones, or otherwise), and you have regulations inside to company (ISO, ...) or legal requirements that limit your freedom. Then having manager approval before going forward is definitely helping, and the manager taking a big part of the decision is probably actually helping.
Usually groups are on a spectrum between the ideal situation which you assumed and the horrible combination I described. The verticality of the manager taking decision is designed to address the part of the group that is a bit messy, not the part that works well. It's super easy to manage a small group of talented, cooperative and motivated people. The challenge is to ensure groups that are not like this still deliver value, and possibly reach that state.
Part of what they were hoping for was visibility into other domains of the business. As a manager, you (hopefully) have a broader view of the situation, of your co-manager's priorities, of outside limitations, etc. etc. etc. I'm sure they thought they had the best recommendation given their knowledge, but they couldn't have a company-wide perspective, and were giving you a chance to point out their blind spots.
I’m not totally convinced of that, but it might be: we were the small custom dev shop in PS in a much larger product co that never did figure out how to sell PS effectively, despite the product absolutely requiring it for anything serious.
My view was limited, sadly, for various political reasons, among other things.
No, AFAICR, it was simply that this was a bit larger, a bit hairier than the usual case, enough so that they were unwilling to make the call without management support.
It’s amazing how much we can learn from a 30s episode.
That's one of the tougher things with management is making those calls. At least they came to you with alternatives and/or recommendations. I have always tried to be pragmatic in my decisions/solutions. I ask myself, is this actually fixing something we need fixing or some new tech that doesn't really resolve the problem right now (but that maybe I should earmark for the future).
Did you ever get to a point where, as long as they collectively agreed on the right way forward, they had your implicit okay and didn't actually need to go to you and have you say it?
We tried to run that way as much as possible. IIRC (it was a long time ago), this was a particularly complex case and particularly sensitive customer.
They absolutely did the right thing, and they did it well. It just had me so confused at first, because I was used to being the one doing the analysis, and their analysis was spot on.
My inner dialog was along the lines of well, I have nothing to offer from either a technical or support perspective so what do I do now, oh, yeah, make a call, that’s what’s needed here!
(It was my first management job. Once I figured that out, a lot of things got a lot easier.)
Enough No and you will find yourself questioning why are your best people leaving, very often your best people are the one who cares and are pushing for better change.
At the end you will have yourself a team of yes-man which, ironically, is often what you really need in the kind of environment that demands saying No a lot - you need people that simply get things done accordingly without having too much ambition, that eliminates the need to put those foolish ambition to rest.
> Understand what the priority is, evaluate the ROI for the ideas you propose, determine whether the timing for it is the right one.
The issue with this approach is that most "lesser skilled" managers will not understand the ROI of fundamental work, that not immediately leads to an ROI, as sometimes those things cannot be well quantified.
Those are the cases, where you then need to be able to trust the more skilled team members to make those decisions also on other value driving criteria.
I’ve always told people that when they’re fresh to the industry, they will likely be a “Yes, And” person. Someone super excited and willing to accept the reality and build upon it.
As you become more senior, you realize that no is your superpower to get anything meaningful done. You then become a “No, But” person in which you can make sound decisions and justify them accordingly.
With fear of rejection from other people as one of my greatest anxiety drivers, I can relate a lot.
One of my favorite learnings about the topic recently though is that saying "yes", "maybe" or even just staying silent is effectively the same as saying "no", just in other dimensions: and vice versa.
Saying no to nuclear means saying yes to coal.
Saying yes to doing something I don't like because I don't want to offend someone also means saying no to being honest and enjoying myself.
Just embracing that the vast majority of decisions have the potential to offend — but that this offense is also not my own but the recipients' feeling, originating from _their_ belief systems that I have no control over — was immensely liberating to me.
The hardest thing about making decisions is accepting that some people don’t want that responsibility. If you are willing to make decisions, and have a decent track record and can justify them in a manner acceptable to your organization, you can go far.
I hadn’t been a manager long when two of my staff came to tell me of a customer problem. They summarized the situation, offered alternatives, and a recommendation. Then waited.
I tried to look pensive as if considering what they were saying, while all the while thinking that their assessment was cogent and their recommendation spot on. Honestly, I couldn’t figure out why they were there. It took me a bit to realize they needed me to okay it: I was the manager, so I had to take responsibility, they didn’t want that.
OK, let’s do that, I said, and if they went, happy. One of them became a very good manager some time later when they decided they did want that responsibility.