Declaring victory

Declarative leadership FTW?

Yesterday, we explored declarative leadership.

The question remains: does it ever make sense to be an imperative leader?

Reader João writes in:

When I was a younger manager I tended to go more towards an imperative style as I thought the manager was supposed to be the one who is best suited to take all decisions. As I gained experience, I also saw that giving a team context, direction, and autonomy produced better results and a better team.

I find that some situations still call for a more imperative style, though. Some wartime-like situations, such as having to deliver something quickly where the manager has experience with the same delivery but the team still needs to learn everything, or during incidents where everything seems to be on fire and it could be best for people to focus on their specialities and leave control (and explicit direction) to someone else.

However, I did find that with an empowered (or declared) enough team, these situations tended to be more and more rare.

This resonated and aligned with my experiences, too.

Working with juniors and during critical incidents are the two key examples where imperative style makes most sense to me.

Even in these cases, I'd say there's still a place for a declarative approach.

Trusting juniors to figure things out for themselves can be messy, difficult and frustrating for all involved, but often produces the best results in terms of genuine learning (especially when given feedback after).

Similarly, for critical incidents. Sometimes, when prod is down, the best thing you can do is trust the team to deal with it.

So, apart from a few exceptions, declarative seems to win hands down.

Right?

Stay tuned.