I learned three important lessons that day
I learned three important lessons that day. First, I couldnt expect my team to make decisions on their own unless I told them how I wanted them to make those decisions. That meant focusing on the single most important thing and not inundating them with hundreds of variables to consider. Second, if they made the decision with the most important thing in mind, and it turned out wrong, I couldn't get upset with them. If I did that, they'd never make decisions without me. The third lesson was perhaps the most revealing: I myself didn't know what the most important thing was. That's why I couldn't tell them.
— from Leadership & Business (Leadership/Business) · Clear Thinking: The Art and Science of Making Better Decisions by Shane Parrish
In the book
Teach people how you want decisions made, then let them make them. I learned three hard lessons about this: that you can't expect your team to decide on their own unless you've told them how; that if they decide with the right thing in mind and it still goes wrong, you cannot punish them or they'll never decide again; and — most humbling — that sometimes the reason you can't tell them the most important thing is that you haven't figured it out yourself. The military has a clean phrase for the fix: commander's intent. You give people the intent — the why and the what — clearly enough that they can act and decide without you in the room. — Leadership & Business (Leadership/Business)