Popular Opinion: Involve your team in the decision-making process.

My learning: It is not necessary to involve your management team in every decision you make. I would go one step further and say if you need to make a decision, often DO NOT involve the team for long. Take a view; if you get something useful, buy it, or else move ahead. Close the chapter.

Reasons why I say so: When you involve team members in making decisions:

• Sometime, the decisions never get implemented due to the ongoing debates, constant criticism, or a few non-risky elements in your team who would, in the end, convince you to be cautious or think again.
• The decisions get delayed and lose the importance of it. As a founder, you get 10 things in mind – only a selected few would work, but the difference between a founder and a thinker is the founder took the step. In order to do something, one needs to take the step, not just evaluate it. Evaluating anything deeply would mostly lead to non-taking of decisions. So often, you have to move ahead with intuition which is unexplainable.

And for any founder, it is very important to keep making decisions and move ahead. Overthinking is not their job. They learn mostly from experience (what others call mistakes – and you know when are they mistakes? When they do not follow the below-mentioned points. let’s read that too). 

The above liberty, however comes with some conditions, and the founder has to buy these conditions TOGETHER with the above liberty. Otherwise, the above points are useless. So once you have taken the decision:

• Still, be open to listening: The people who truly care would still come and share their reasons with you. The good thing is – now they must have seen the real implication of the decision and then come to you instead of coming to you with their initial assumptions.
• Be open to change: If things are not working, be open to change. Do not let your ego come in between. Accept that your decision was wrong and change or modify it as per the need.

In the end, be clear and understand that you and the team are on the same side. You are just the person with probably more risk-taking ability and a bird’s eye view of the situation. So be free to make the decisions but be humble enough to accept or change if things are not working.

It’s simple: If things work, the team understands, and you two are together. If thing’s don’t work, you understand, and you two are together. In the end, stay together with the team.

“A successful team is a group of MANY hands and ONE mind.” – Anonymous