HBR Guide to Leading Teams (HBR Guide Series)

Chapter 8

Make Optimal Team Decisions

Much of your team’s time together will be devoted to making decisions about the work: planning tasks, monitoring progress, evaluating outcomes, changing strategies, or responding to crises. Teams often struggle with decision making, though. We all have our stories about leaving a meeting confident that everyone knows who’s doing what—only to later discover that isn’t true. Or getting bogged down in long, tedious discussions about minutiae, losing sight of what’s important. Or realizing that hours were spent essentially endorsing a decision the boss had already made.

But you’re now well equipped to avoid pitfalls like these. While you were building the team’s infrastructure (its goals, roles, and rules), you ...