Why Your Leadership Team Struggles to Make Decisions (and What CEOs Can Do About It)

There's a conversation I had recently with a leadership team that's stayed with me, because it captured something I see constantly in growing businesses, usually in slightly different words but always with the same shape underneath. The team felt responsible for outcomes without having the power to actually act on them, and the board felt accountable for the business without quite being able to see what was happening underneath. Both sides were frustrated with the other, and honestly, both had a point, because nobody had ever drawn a clear line around what the SMT could simply get on and decide versus what genuinely needed to go upstairs.

When that line doesn't exist, you get exactly what you'd expect. Decisions stall because nobody's sure if it's theirs to make. Things get escalated that never needed to be, because escalating feels safer than guessing wrong and getting it wrong in front of everyone. And the people closest to the work, the ones who actually understand the detail better than anyone else in the building, end up waiting on approval for things they were probably best placed to decide themselves in the first place.

What I want to be clear about is that this isn't usually a confidence problem, and it isn't a capability problem either. It's simply that nobody has ever sat down and said, here is what you own, and here is what comes to us. Bain & Company, who've spent years researching exactly this, found that only around 15% of the companies they surveyed actually practice effective decision making well, which tells you this isn't a problem unique to growing SMEs, it's a problem most organisations carry quietly regardless of size. Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko wrote about it properly back in 2006 in their Harvard Business Review piece Who Has the D? How Clear Decision Roles Enhance Organizational Performance, which is where the RAPID framework came from, a way of mapping out who recommends a course of action, who has a genuine veto, who actually decides, and who's left to deliver on it. It's worth a read if you want the formal version of what I'm describing here.

The fastest leadership teams I work with aren't the smartest in the room. They're the clearest. Clarity is what makes a team move quickly, and most teams aren't slow because they're indecisive, they're slow because nobody's ever told them where the boundaries sit. The simplest version of this I've seen work in practice is a single rule that does more heavy lifting than any lengthy governance document ever could. If it's within budget, the team decides. If it sits outside what's been budgeted, it goes to the board. That one distinction alone removes a huge amount of the guesswork that normally clogs up decision making, because everyone in the room can ask themselves the same question before they raise their hand to escalate something that was always theirs to call.

What it requires, though, is that the rule actually gets written down and used, rather than agreed on in a meeting and quietly forgotten by the following week. A delegation of authority that lives in a slide deck nobody ever opens again isn't really a delegation of authority, it's just good intentions dressed up as governance. A recent HBR article, What Companies Get Wrong About Decision Rights, backs this up with some proper research behind it. The authors looked at over a hundred companies using frameworks like RACI and RAPID and found they tend to fail for the same handful of reasons every time, leaders set the decision roles before the goal was actually agreed, the roles get treated as a static list one senior person wrote once and never revisited, people misunderstand what the roles genuinely mean in practice, and hierarchy quietly overrides the whole thing regardless of what was written down. That last one is the bit I see most often, the rule exists on paper, but the moment something feels important enough, it gets escalated anyway out of habit. The teams that get genuine speed out of this aren't the ones with the most sophisticated framework on paper, they're the ones who've made the boundary specific enough that nobody has to ask twice, and who keep coming back to revisit it as the business changes.

And here's the part that often gets missed entirely. The real test of a leadership team isn't what happens in the meeting itself. It's what happens in the three weeks in between. I've sat with teams who run a genuinely brilliant session, leave with real energy and clear actions, and then quietly drift back into exactly the same habits the moment they're back at their desks, because the accountability that actually mattered was never really about the room. It was about whether people followed through once nobody was watching, whether issues got raised early rather than left to fester until the next scheduled catch up, and whether colleagues felt able to challenge each other honestly without waiting for permission from the top of the table. Part of doing this well is knowing that not every decision deserves the same level of process either. David Snowden and Mary Boone made this point well in their HBR article A Leader's Framework for Decision Making, arguing that effective leaders shift how they make decisions depending on whether a situation is simple, complicated, complex or genuinely chaotic. A team that treats every decision the same way, however clear their delegation rules are on paper, will still end up either moving too slowly on the simple stuff or too fast on the things that actually deserve a proper pause.

An SMT that only behaves like a team for the hour they're together every fortnight isn't really a team yet, not in any way that holds under pressure. The shift happens when people start carrying that same sense of shared ownership into the ordinary working week, bringing problems forward before they're forced to, following up on what they said they'd do without being chased, and treating the time between meetings as just as much a part of the job as the meeting itself.

So if you're sitting with a leadership team that feels slower than it should be, or more dependent on you than you'd like, it might be worth asking two things rather than one. Does your SMT actually know precisely where their authority ends, and what does your team genuinely do with the three weeks in between?

Nicola Gunstone works with CEOs and MDs of growing businesses on exactly this kind of leadership challenge. See more articles like this at https://www.nicolagunstone.com/blog