Latest / UNLEASHED By LoyaltyOps / Decision Ownership: The Missing Layer
Transcript
- Mickey Anderson: you Picture a decision in your organization that has been circling for weeks. A vendor contract, a production direction, budget call. Something that needed to be decided. The right people were in the room. The information was available. And yet, the decision kept moving. To the next meeting, to the next calendar slot, to the next person who could wait in. Nobody felt authorized to make the call, so nobody did. This is the single most common execution problem I see in growing organizations, and it almost never has anything to do with the quality of the people involved. It has to do with the layer of structure that was never built. When decision authority is unclear in growing organization, two things happen. The first is escalation. Decisions that a department leader or team could own get pushed up to the CEO or to the executive team because nobody is confident they have the authority to act. So they wait. And the person at the top receives a question that was never theirs to answer. They don't have the context from the ground on what the decision impacts. who it impacts, the potential risks and consequences. The second is avoidance. Decisions that need to get made get deferred because the person who could make the call is worried it might conflict with someone else who believes they should have been consulted first. Both patterns produce the same result. Decisions take longer than they should. The organization moves slower. than its talent and resources warrant. And the frustrating part is that everyone in the organization can feel it. The leader who escalated the decision knows it should have stayed with them. The team waiting on the outcome knows the delay is unnecessary. The problem is structural. It just rarely gets diagnosed that way. Decision ownership is a distinct operational concept separate from seniority, from title, and from what the org chart shows. It answers one specific question. For this type of decision, who has the right and responsibility to make the call? This is different from delegating work. A leader can delegate the execution of a project, the day-to-day management, the coordination, the delivery. while retaining decision authority over budget, scope, and direction. Decision ownership is about the decisions themselves, not the work that follows them. When decision ownership is clear, four things happen. The right person knows they have the authority to act. They gather input from the right people. They make the call. They communicate it. They do not wait for permission. They do not seek consensus on a decision that was always theirs. They act. That sounds simple. In most growing organizations, it has never been formally designed. Let me be specific about what unclear decisions actually cost. The first cost is speed. Every decision that escalates unnecessarily adds delay. One decision that could have been made in a single conversation takes three meetings and week of calendar time. When you add up the salaries and hours, you'll be shocked at the true cost. Think about your leadership team. If three decisions per day travel to the CEO that belong somewhere else and each one takes 15 minutes of context, conversation and response, that's 45 minutes per day, nearly four hours per week, over a quarter That's 50 hours of the most expensive time in your organization spent on decisions the team should own. The second cost is energy. Leaders who are unsure of their authority spend their mental bandwidth navigating who should decide rather than what to decide. They seek consensus when what they need is input. They avoid making calls that might create friction. The emotional load of navigating this is massive and it compounds every week. The third cost, arguably the most expensive, is trust. When decisions are slow and unpredictable, people throughout the organization lose confidence in the leadership team. Priorities shift without explanation, delays feel arbitrary, and leaders look uncertain even when they are not. This erosion of trust is quiet, it's hard to pinpoint, and it's even harder. to reverse. And it starts the moment the organization scales past the point where everyone can see who owns what. Making decision ownership visible requires four steps. None of them are complex. All of them require the discipline to actually do the work. Step one, identify your recurring decisions. Sit with your leadership team and list every recurring decision that comes up regularly. Hiring, budgets, production direction, product changes, client commitments, process changes, vendor relationships. Most leadership teams find between 15 and 25 recurring decisions that represent the majority of decision-making activity. Step two, assign a single owner to each type. and define the type of decision needed. So one person, not a team, not a committee, one person whose name is attached to the recurring decision. Now, how do they need to make that decision? Is it consultative where they need to gather input from specific stakeholders, but the decision is theirs alone? Is it a collective decision where multiple stakeholders come together to make the decision as a unit? Is it something they need specific approval on? And if so, whom? Shared ownership is not ownership. When two people own a decision, neither person does. Step three, communicate the map. Share it with the entire leadership team and the deciders. When everyone knows who owns which decisions, questions go to the right person. Unnecessary escalation drops. Meetings that existed to figure out who should decide. become unnecessary. Step four, review it quarterly. Decision ownership is not permanent. As the organization grows and the roles evolve, decision rights need to be updated to match the current reality. A quarterly review keeps the map functional. Four steps, no new technology required, no restructuring required, just the discipline. to make decision authority explicit and the commitment to maintain it. Here's the challenge I wanna leave you with. Think of one decision in your organization that keeps surfacing in meetings. It's escalated, no one's confident about who should make the call or it continues to escalate even though they know they should be able to make the call. Name it, name the person who should own it. Provide them with clarity on how to make the decision, consultative, escalated, theirs alone. Provide them with clarity and then communicate it with them and the team. That is the first entry on your decision ownership map. Start there, build from there. Subscribe to Unleashed and hit the bell icon so you don't miss the next episode. I will see you there. finally one together