By Tom Barton, Strategy Consultant
Most organisations still default to a simple assumption:
The more senior someone is, the better positioned they are to make decisions.
So decisions move upwards. To the Managing Director. The Executive Team. The Head of Department.
Strategic oversight matters. But hierarchy is often a poor proxy for decision quality and timeliness.
Because the person with the most authority is rarely the person with the most context, and often not the person with the capacity to act quick enough either.
The best person might be:
- the account manager speaking to customers every day,
- the project lead delivering the work,
- the customer service adviser handling complaints,
- the sales executive hearing objections first-hand,
- or the operations manager dealing with production bottlenecks in real time.
They see the small signals others cannot:
- changing customer needs,
- emerging frustrations,
- shifts in demand,
- operational inefficiencies,
- team capacity pressures,
- and early indicators of risk or opportunity.
And just as importantly, they are often positioned to act on them in time.
Yet many organisations are not designed to make this happen.
Instead, decisions are always passed upwards to leaders who are further removed from the situation and busy. The result is often slow decisions or no decisions and, in some cases, poorer decisions.
What happens when organisations push decision-making closer to the action? Opportunities are acted on sooner and issues are identified and resolved quicker, and better outcomes are achieved.
But fully decentralising decision-making can create a problem of strategic drift. Therefore, for me, the highest-performing organisations have an ability to put decision-making in the hands of the people best equipped to make those decisions, but maintain alignment around a common direction.
Without clear principles, organisations drift into:
- conflicting decisions,
- blurred accountability,
- duplicated effort,
- misdirection,
- and internal friction.
The best high-performance environments I’ve worked in were defined by top down clarity that enabled frontline decision making.
Namely those were sporting environments, where coaches and captains throughout the organisation understood the standards expected. They understood the cultural and technical direction and had the authority to act and make new decisions within those boundaries.
In practice, leaders did not try to centralise every decision nor did they de centralise every decision.
Instead, they created central clarity that allowed the right people to make the right decisions at the right time.
They also remained clear about when decisions should move upwards.
So question this. How are decisions made in your business? Could you benefit, in terms of speed and quality, from putting more decisions to the front line?
