This is spot on. The real trick is being able to take some risks and let things flow without losing nerves. The onus of delivery and having quality output within a tight time-frame lies with the manager leading the team. More often than not, these considerations make mangers - even the most willing ones - ignore the values of delegating or trusting the team capabilities. It’s great that the manager’s manager could see this in this particular case and encouraged more proactive team engagement. That’s a big thing really . Also, this has direct connection with the culture of an organization: though it’s not necessarily going to happen in every single case (rather productivity may actually increase once team gets going), still there has to be a tolerance threshold within the organization for allowing some mistakes or slowdown when a team is working on a project together.