Take me to your leader: The importance of knowing who's in charge

You’ve probably been there. A new job, a new project team, a new client. A great first meeting. Everyone is invited to talk, to listen, to contribute. Everyone is assured that their voices will be heard, their concerns addressed, their ideas taken seriously.

Fast forward a week, a month, a year. One by one, those voices have been silenced, those concerns dismissed, those ideas undermined. What remains are the ideas and concerns of the person who (it has now become clear) is in charge.

To do their jobs effectively, members of a project team need to know who the decision maker is. We all like democracy, those of us in education and cultural heritage especially so. If it’s truly a democracy, great. But if it’s a dictatorship, people would rather know from the outset than be led down a rhetorical primrose path of “democracy,” “consensus,” and “collaboration” only to have the rug pulled out from under them when the decision maker finally decides to assert his or her will.

If you are the decision maker, let us know. Anything less treats team members like children and wastes everybody’s time. What’s worse, it makes for shortsighted, haphazard, second-rate work product.