There is a big difference between considering the whole team and making them complicit in a decision that hurts someone. Framing escaping responsibility as the mark of a true leader is I feel a pretty crappy way to define a leader.
Leading your team to a decision that works for them, and the team member who should have been fired but wasn’t is the mark of a true team. Dude needs to get his head out of his ass and if he needs his team to pull it out, so be it. But yes, a leader will involve a team in a decision that affects the entire team, the won’t unilaterally make a decision.
I couldn't agree more. Most of the members of the team here will most likely vest as well, and the way employee performance can affect vesting is very much a relevant question to them.
To go back one step, saying a manager must decide alone otherwise it's an escape from responsibility is quite a bizarre claim to make. Making a decision without consulting your team, when your goal is to establish trust, will 100% backfire. It will come back to haunt you EVEN if people agreed with the decision, simply because that decision was taken arbitrarily. That such important decisions could be arbitrary, without meaningful involvement of the team, signals to the team that they are all at the mercy of such future arbitrary decisions. Finally, consulting the team does not mean that the decision is carried by everyone. A consensus should be sought, and the founder would be foolish to make such a decision against his team, but ultimately, the founder is in charge of the final decision and will bear the responsibility for it.
