I have my claim to a minute expertise in this domain. Was assigned to lead an initiative for something that was not achieved in 3 prior attempts. I was given the 6 strongest, most genius engineers from 6 different teams. Everyone, including me, was quite opinionated and with a great explanation for their opinion. It was not an explicit credo, but I made it my position to leverage the mirror of the saying “don’t interrupt your enemy when they make a mistake”. For us it would be, “don’t interrupt your friend when they make something great” with the corollary “do something else, and make it great”. There were other important parts to that like finding the organic separation of duties and teasing or nudging directions, accepting suboptimal valleys in places, etc. But it worked, and I am as proud as I can be for being lucky. Rooms of geniuses are challenging but also such a great opportunity to learn from each other and learn how to collectively optimise the boundaries to focus on disagreement only where it makes sense.
I believe what you describe is what I have learned to be known as Servant Leadership[0]. I could be totally wrong in my interpretation of your experience and admittingly may be projecting a leadership approach I quite fancy.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
EDIT:
Removed unnecessary qualification in the last sentence.
Kind of, but with a different motivation at inception at least. In a perverse bike shedding variation, in a room of experts, disagreement will tend to root in bringing every matter under the lense of individual expertise. No one wins there, as before addressing the problem, the disagreements tend to focus on context. There is a certain art in giving ownership on the subject matter expertise, while drawing the lines on the overlaps, where argumentation is focused and productive rather than a tug of war to pull the subject in a comfort zone.
