> If consensus is the protocol-du-jour, your service/product/offering suffers in the mid-to-long term (as well as alienation of the senior people whom you want driving).

I don't believe that is true. Junior people are only junior people if you treat them like that. If you are the lead dev and you work together with people junior to you (in experience, possibly not in years) then the fastest way to get them to grow is to get them on-board with the decisions taken as a team.

"Pulling rank" is an option of last resort and it is actually a management failure, far better to spend the extra time to educate your team members to the point where they start making the right decisions. This may require introduction to some of the aspects driving commercial decisions but that's fine.

That's an investment, and in a job market that is overheated you might be teaching someone enough to leave and to go work elsewhere but I've found that this strategy is more often than not rewarded with loyalty.

At least half of these problems boil down to effective communications.

I'm glad you bring up these points. It boils down to viewing conflict resolution as being (often) a temporary matter of information sharing with rationality as the ultimate goal.

People who enjoy having authority for its own sake are usually not good at this, since they think they have earned the right to be authoritative, and resist the dialog necessary to achieve true consensus.

I think he's talking about the support aspect. When a group decision is made, the actions taken are often not a group effort. If the group decided to do X but most of the people capable of acting wanted to do Y, you're going to have problems.

Nothing makes me bristle more than having to clean up after mistake that I warned the team not to make in the first place.

> Nothing makes me bristle more than having to clean up after mistake that I warned the team not to make in the first place.

I call those learning moments. Then I engage the people that made or caused the mistake and I'll help them clean up, rather than that I'll clean up for them. That way the lesson gets learned and the next time around it will be easier, and works a lot better than 'I told you so'.

"Pulling rank" is indeed a sign of failure, especially if nobody on the team has rank because then it becomes a question of who on the team has a "relationship" with management.

I understand your logic. But I think it's not that simple: Part of being a senior engineer (at least for me) is to educate my less senior peers. And in a sneaky, non-condescending way, that is.

It's usually thursday or friday evening that my team will pop some beers and talk conceptuals. In those informal discussions information just flows, sentiments are shared and fruitful decisions are reached.

Winning and losing battles implies that battles exist. That's bad enough for me.