Should I overrule my team on this

Leaders have two instruments and need both. Influence is the emotional one and it depends on consent, which means there can be no fear, force, or fraud. Power is do what I say or I will fire you, which is coercion. There is a hierarchy and it is essentially a map of power, with ethical and unethical ways to both accumulate and wield it.

Using positional power instead of deferring to the team is a real choice to make deliberately each time, not a default to fall back on for every decision. Knowing which decisions are big enough to require your own call comes mostly from intuition and experience rather than from a framework.

Which leads to the question this sheet is really about. Sometimes the right call, even when you are certain the team is wrong, is to let them fail. Not despite the cost, but because paying it now is cheaper than a team that never learns to trust its own judgment and needs you to make every call forever.

What you get

• A five-question check to run before choosing an instrument
• The harder question, about what a team that never trusts itself costs you
• A note on intuition, and on the learned rules that get mistaken for it
• Three things to say if you do overrule them

Adapted from the Mindfulness chapter of The Mindful Product Company by Sam McAfee.