What do you want to learn?

For the last two years, I've been trying a new approach to how I handle the questions of "Should we do X?" My standard response has become "What do you want to learn?" It's something that has been working really well for me and I want to share my thoughts on it.

First, let's start with an axiom. If you can explain the solution you want to implement using simple words then you have a good understanding of the solution.

Generally speaking, when someone on the team asks should we do X they are looking for someone to validate that they're doing the right thing. As a manager that person should not be me. The reason for this is two-fold. Firstly, if I make the decision for the team then I re-enforce that I can make the decision for them. Secondly, I don't believe I'm the most appropriate person to make the decision. I'm going to dig into these separately so keep the points at the back of your mind.

Let's tackle why I (the manager) am not the appropriate person to make decisions. 

To me, the role of the manager is to facilitate delivery. You go off and assemble your squad of highly skilled individuals and give them problems to solve. Just because they're skilled in something does not mean they know how to work as a team or know how to get the most out of each other. While they're heads down in solving the current problem, are they also focusing on whether they're solving the right problems for the business? It's a rare individual that can maintain both broad context and deep understanding of everything happening in a business. Instead, we hire a manager who will be our person on the technical team. They are able to keep track of what's going on and make sure the team stays aligned on what the business needs. They balance the needs of the team against the needs of the business, prioritise ruthlessly and make sure the team is continually delivering value. This is why I believe the role of the manager is to facilitate delivery. 

Okay, it feels like I've digressed a bit there. The point I wanted to make was that as the manager I am not the most appropriate person to make technical decisions. The most appropriate person is the person who has the right context. That person is likely to be the one that just spent hours digging into the problem. That person is also going to need to live with whatever trade-off they've made when it comes to supporting whatever is built. My role as a manager is to support them and help them make those decisions.

The other point I wanted to make was that I don't want to become the bottleneck for all decisions. I'm quite happy to make decisions, and with every decision I make it's one where the team has not chosen their path and does not own the decision that was made. If I keep that up then I'm likely to end up with disgruntled engineers who feel micromanaged, and it's likely that the team will not make decisions in my absence.

We've hired smart people, let them make the decisions. If they're blocked then we need to help them get unblocked without telling them what to do. This is why I've started asking the question "What do you want to learn?"  

In asking the question I am forcing them to explain why they want to do something. If they understand why they want to do something then we're in a good place. If we don't have a clear understanding of why we're doing it, then the general case has been that the individual goes away and thinks about it some more. If they do understand the reason for why we're doing it, then it's possible they have uncertainties on the approach. Again the same question can help. This time we want them to think about deliberate action, so we can walk through the steps and ask the question "What will you learn?" Through this process, we can uncover where the uncertainty is and hopefully unblock the team without making the decision for them.

This approach has been extremely useful to me over the last two years, and it has been interesting to watch engineers adopt it when they work with each other. I am very confident that my team would make the same decisions whether I was present or not. The power to make decisions stays with the team and I effectively function as a slightly intelligent rubber duck.