Who Gets to Decide? Six Things Leaders Should Ask About Decision Rights

“Empower your people.”

It sounds simple enough.

But giving someone permission to make decisions and creating an organization where people are actually equipped to make them are two very different things.

Decision rights were the focus of a recent Sixth Wing peer learning conversation with our Chiefs of Staff, and what started as a discussion about ownership quickly broadened into broader questions about trust, accountability, organizational speed, strategy, and leadership itself.

Here are six questions worth considering.

1. Does everyone actually know who gets to decide?

It is one thing to tell someone they have authority. It is another to make the boundaries of that authority clear.

Where can they act independently? When should they seek input? What requires approval? And where does their authority end?

When those lines are fuzzy, even capable people can hesitate, overreach, or escalate decisions that should never have needed escalation in the first place.

2. Are you asking for input or asking for consensus?

There is an important difference.

Collaborative cultures can unintentionally blur the line between having a voice in a decision and owning it.

People should know when their perspective is being sought, when they are helping shape the decision, and who ultimately owns the call.

That clarity can make difficult decisions considerably easier to navigate.

3. Is your decision problem actually a strategy problem?

This was one of the more interesting questions raised during the conversation. When decisions repeatedly move up the organizational ladder, it is easy to assume people lack authority.

But what if they lack something else?

If leaders don't understand what the organization is prioritizing or what trade-offs it is willing to make, even clearly assigned decision rights may not be enough.

Sometimes people don't need more permission. They need more context.

4. Have you accidentally created a “pocket veto”?

Someone technically owns the decision. But everyone knows a senior leader may step in and change it. So does that person really own it?

When leaders routinely override decisions or remain informally involved after authority has supposedly been delegated, teams learn quickly. They wait. They check. They escalate.

And organizational speed suffers.

5. Are you optimizing for the perfect decision or organizational momentum?

Not every decision needs to be the decision you personally would have made.

That can be a difficult adjustment for experienced leaders.

But if improving every decision requires senior leaders to continually insert themselves into the process, the pursuit of better decisions can ultimately make the organization less effective.

At some point, leaders have to decide what matters more: perfecting an individual decision or building an organization capable of making many good decisions without them.

6. Are you part of the bottleneck?

This may be the hardest question.

Chiefs of Staff and senior leaders often become involved precisely because they have context others don't. They see across functions, anticipate problems, understand the principal's perspective, and know how decisions connect.

That makes their involvement enormously valuable.

It can also make them indispensable in ways they never intended.

If people routinely wait for your input, your review, your interpretation, or your approval before moving, the question becomes uncomfortable but necessary:

Are you creating leverage for the organization, or have you become another layer it has to move through?

The Value Isn't Just in the Answer

What made the decision rights conversation valuable wasn't arriving at one universal framework for who should decide what.

It was hearing how the same challenge showed up differently across organizations and leadership roles.

One participant's experience prompted another question. A real-world example challenged an assumption. Different perspectives surfaced trade-offs that might not have been obvious from inside a single organization.

That's peer learning.

At Sixth Wing, our Peer Learning Services are intentionally designed to create more of these conversations. Through facilitated peer groups, Chief of Staff Office Hours, topical leadership discussions, and sessions led by Sixth Wing coaches, facilitators, and guest experts from a range of disciplines, leaders have the opportunity to explore the challenges they face alongside others facing the same ones.

There are frameworks and expertise in the room, certainly. But there is also something harder to replicate: the collective experience of the people sitting around the table. Because sometimes leadership development doesn't start with someone giving you the answer.

It starts with someone asking a question you hadn't thought to ask.

Interested in being part of the conversation? Learn more about Sixth Wing Peer Learning Services and the communities designed to help leaders think, learn, and lead alongside one another. Email us at info@sixthwingllc.com