Leading a team, am I being overbearing?

Question

I'm in what seems to me a very strange position. I'm "team lead" in role for a particular project, Sr. Software Engineer in job title. On my team I have 4 developers, one of whom serves a similar role on another project but now mine has been given priority so he's working on mine. I also have 2 testers, one of whom is a Manager. Another member of the team is the "Customer Representative" who is a part of a completely unrelated department. I also have a Manager who is directly above me and I believe also above the Manager of Test that's part of my team...not so sure about that though.

I've tried to get clarification on why my role is exactly several times. It's been hard for me to figure out where my authority begins and ends, if I even have any. The answer I'm currently working with is that I am "technical lead" of the team. This seems to mean that my authority is over technical decisions regarding architecture, design, and process/coding standards as they pertain to the product code itself.

Today something came up and the results of code I delegated to one of the members of my team where shown to the rest of the company in our Scrum show-it-all-off meeting. The customer representative person does the showing off. Something was shown off today that I really disagreed with and nobody had ever even asked me if I wanted to have a say in what happened. In short, in order to provide the ability of a user to display a value in a report in the following manners ("doc" units, design units, rounded, not rounded) they provided access fields for each permutation. Thus we have the value in rounded doc units, rounded design units, unrounded doc units, unrounded design units. Each record that the user will be wishing to work with has many such values and each one is permuted in this manner.

I really hate this.

The people we showed this to want to make sure that the API we use for reports is the same as the way we do things like export data to Excel. Unfortunately, now we're gaining this momentum in a direction that I think is really, really bad.

I did get a little upset at the next meeting and I asked the two people who'd done this, "Why wasn't I involved in this decision??" It's an issue that keeps coming up and I have a hard time it seems to just get people on the team I'm supposed to be leading to ask me if I want to be involved. Sometimes I do not and I think whatever they come up with will be fine. Other times I do. Unless people ask me though it's hard to even know that something is going on that needs my input and they don't give me that opportunity.

Unfortunately, my authority doesn't extend to telling people, "Next time you go off and do something like this on your own without even talking to me, you're going to be disciplined." That's a "PR" issue that is one area that's quite clearly not in my scope of authority. That's fine with me actually since I don't want to have to deal with that kind of crap if someone else is willing.

Today though, my manager, in front of everyone (which I guess is partly my fault too for bringing it up like that) told me that I can't be involved in every decision and need to delegate.

I of course think I'm right....I always do. I don't say things I think are BS. I think I should have been approached about this issue and asked if I had a better idea. My direction for this would have actually been to just decide on ONE value to provide for now, since this was actually the very beginning stages of a new feature, and discuss options for providing further access in the future if so desired. I never would have approved of or recommended the current implementation and I really don't think it should have seen the light of day.

The question is, am I the one being unreasonable?

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Well, the two of us talked about it and agreed that we both "dropped the ball" and we seem to be on the same page. Monday mornings... We're going to try to make sure my role is clear in the team and that yeah, I get to decide when there's a design or task change that needs to happen; I get proposed to and either agree or decide I need to look deeper. Then there are some other bits I can try to work on to make sure they know that they can come to me.