What are People Actually Allowed to Decide?

As a leader you can't be involved in every little thing. You also have to be aware enough to not just make statements such “Why didn't they just make a decision?” when one wasn't made. Sure, something needed attention, someone saw it, and the work sat there. If it didn't get done, just asking why isn't actually leading. Leading is about taking a step back and asking if a decision needed to be made did the person feel empowered to make it.

Imagine you're an engineer working on something the team has committed to delivering. A customer issue comes in. You think it needs attention now, but taking it means stopping the work you were explicitly told was the priority. Can you do that? Who needs to know? What happens when someone asks why the committed work is late?

From a distance, that can look like an obvious decision. From the person holding both responsibilities, there are a few missing pieces.

Telling them to “take ownership” doesn't fill those in. They may already feel responsible for both things and that's part of the problem.

I work across product and engineering, and a lot of the decisions in that space involve disappointing somebody. We can fix this now, and something else will move. We can keep the date, and some scope will come out. We can help this team, and we'll have less time for our own work. Judgment includes deciding which consequence we're willing to accept.

If every consequence still needs my approval, I need to be honest about how much authority I've actually handed over.

One way to find out is to take a real example and walk through it with the team. Pick something recent where work got stuck and ask what the person understood at the time. What did they think was most important? What were they allowed to stop? Who could they ask if two priorities conflicted?

I'd want to hear the answers before explaining what I would have done. Otherwise it becomes very easy to teach people to repeat my reasoning back to me, and I learn very little about why the work got stuck.

Then we can get specific about the next occurrence. For the customer issue, that might mean agreeing which kinds of problems justify interrupting planned work, who can make that call, and where they tell everyone what has moved. If they can't judge the impact yet, there needs to be someone they can reach and a clear expectation about when to ask. “Use your judgment” becomes much more useful when we've talked about what that judgment needs to account for.

The same applies to escalation. Asking for help should give someone a way to move the work forward. If a person has two conflicting instructions, they need to know who can resolve them. Telling them to be more proactive while leaving that unanswered just gives them another thing to worry about. Being clear is being kind.

There's also work for the leader after the decision happens. Say we agree that the engineer can pause planned work for a particular kind of customer problem. They do exactly that, and later someone is unhappy about the delay. I need to explain the tradeoff we agreed to. If I leave the engineer alone to defend it, they'll have a pretty good reason to ask permission next time.

We can still review the call. Maybe the issue was less urgent than it first appeared. Maybe we need a better way to assess it. A useful review looks at the information available when the decision was made and what would help next time. Knowing the outcome gives us an advantage the person making the original decision didn't have.

None of this means every stalled decision is a problem with authority. Someone might need more practice, more context, or clearer expectations about their role. Those are useful things to discover. I just want to check what we've asked people to navigate before deciding the problem is their ability.

And I have to include myself in that check. I'm very good at stepping in and taking control. Letting someone else make the call means allowing room for a choice I might not have made, provided it's within what we agreed. That takes some discipline from me too. I will use AI as a tool for things like this. I ask it to review a series of decisions I've made, messages that have been sent, transcripts to parse. I give it a rubric and what outcomes I want. It then can help identify key areas for myself and the team.

If you're frustrated that everything comes back to you, take one recurring decision this week and talk it through with the person doing the work. Ask them what they believe they're allowed to decide without you. Compare that with what you thought you'd delegated. Any difference gives you something concrete to work on together. Leadership is hard. It's not just about being in a discipline for a long time. There are quite a lot more factors that play into it. Start with one small thing and keep going from there. Know what you want as the outcome. For me, I want my teams empowered.