[majormajor]

To illustrate how consensus-decision-making can be a tricky balance, I've been in a situation before where I was managing a team of a few other developers (about 50% hands-on myself) and so tried to stay away from being "the decider" since there were others closer to the code.

The feedback my own manager shared with me that had been collected from my reports was that they appreciated what I was trying to do, but that they also wanted me to have a more active technical leadership/decision-making roles.

What I'd failed to do was talk enough specifically with the rest of the team around what they wanted the roles to be, vs just assuming they'd want maximum autonomy. This will vary depending on composition of team, familiarity of the devs on the team with the problem area and stack, etc.

It will also depend on if managers are expected to be almost-purely people-managers or if they're also expected to be domain knowledge leaders as well.

There's no one-size-fits-all approach, but the thing I've seen that separates a good manager from a bad manager is being able to adjust their approach in things like that based on the situation vs sticking to a script.