Who Should Own This Decision? How Decision Rights Define Leadership

Here's something worth sitting with for a moment.

Think about the last five decisions you made this week. Not the big, obvious ones — the everyday calls that landed on your desk, filled your calendar, or pulled you into meetings you weren't sure you needed to attend.

Now ask yourself: did those decisions actually belong to you?

There's a quiet dysfunction running through many leadership teams. Leaders hold on to decisions they should release. And unknowingly avoid ones they should own. From the inside, it rarely looks like a problem. It just feels like being busy.

But busyness and good decision-making are not the same thing.

When a decision lands at the wrong level, the consequences ripple outward. Teams wait for answers they could have reached themselves. Execution slows. And somewhere in the organisation, the person who lives closest to the problem is watching a decision get made without their voice in it.

The wrong ownership produces the wrong outcome. Even when the logic looks sound on paper.

So before you decide anything, ask this first: should I be the one deciding this?

Think of it like a detective arriving at a scene. The instinct is to start gathering clues. But a good detective first asks — am I even working the right case?

Decision ownership comes down to three things: who holds the accountability for the outcome, who has the context about the situation, and who has proximity to the consequence. When all three live in the same person, decisions stick. When they're split, things go wrong — even when the answer seems right.

Here's what that looks like in practice. A senior leader decides to restructure a client process. They have the accountability. But the account manager — who speaks to that client weekly — has the context. And the customer success team carries the consequence daily. The decision gets made. But it doesn't hold, because ownership was fractured from the start.

That's not a strategy problem. It's a decision rights problem.

Once you've asked who should decide, it helps to understand what kind of decision you're actually dealing with. Not all decisions deserve the same weight of attention — and the matrix below maps them across two dimensions: how significant the consequences could be, and how reversible the decision is if you get it wrong.

A low-consequence, highly reversible decision almost certainly shouldn't be on your desk. A high-consequence, hard-to-reverse decision needs your involvement — but that doesn't always mean deciding alone.

So go back to those five decisions from earlier. For each one, ask two questions. Did this genuinely require my level of accountability? And did the person closest to the consequence have a meaningful say?

If the answer to either is no, you've found a pattern worth addressing.

The goal isn't to hand everything away. It's to build the habit of pausing — just briefly — before you dive in. To ask whether you're working the right case before you start solving it.

That pause is where better decisions begin.

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