> When asking questions of your team, it can help to (separately) ask the same question of multiple individuals. The difference in answers can be illuminating. [...] Ask questions of your boss, your peers, stakeholders, and anyone else that might have useful information.

Be careful with this. Something I've seen at least a few times, and it's always gone badly...

1. A manager (or exec) has real experts on their staff telling them one thing.

2. The manager not only doesn't know enough about the domain, but they don't know how good their own people are.

3. The manager goes and consults someone outside who they think is more expert (e.g., someone they know who worked for a company that pays better, or who is, say, a professor of what the manager thinks is the domain).

4. The outside 'expert' makes some small offhand remark without realizing how big a question it was, or shoots off their mouth without having hardly any accurate information about the actual situation. (ProTip: Professional analysis is different thing than casual recreational chattering on HN.)

5. Manager comes back and overrides the team, based on what the outside 'expert' said.

6. Bad decision is implemented, morale is destroyed, the good people leave, and (AFAIK) that manager doesn't get referrals from the people who left.

> ...but they don't know how good their own people are.

Trust. Easily lost, hard to win and all that. If you don't actually trust those you manage you're not really operating at your best, let alone bringing out the best of your team.

It's a humbling experience tbh, requires putting your faith of success in other people, which in my experience is harder to teach (and is often learned through tough failures) than any kind of computer skills.

Author here. Yes, if you don't know the domain, you should have a really good reason for overriding the team.

Asking questions is a way to gather information that you can then share back with the team. If I were new to a team and had a situation like what you describe, I might go back to my team: "Hey all, I was talking with Professor SmartyPants about $PROBLEM and they suggested $APPROACH. It sounded plausible to me, but y'all are the experts here. Is $APPROACH something we've thought about, and can you help me understand the pros and cons?"

The discussion that follows would help me figure out how good folks on my own team are: who considers the idea, who can explain why it's good or bad, who gets huffy when new ideas are brought.

So yes, 100%, be careful with thinking "I asked questions of a lot of people" means "now I'm an expert that should override what my team is telling me"!