Why Decisions Keep Travelling Upwards During Transformation

If you want more ownership and better judgement, stop treating escalation as a middle-management problem.

Decisions keep travelling upwards when people learn that their authority is conditional: they may decide, provided they make the decision the executive team would have made. Creating ownership therefore requires more than clearer decision rights. It requires both parties to behave differently at the moment a decision feels risky.

The brief – “At our upcoming conference, we’d like you to talk about ownership. We need our leaders to step up, take decisions themselves and use their judgement rather than pushing decision-making up to the executive team. Is this something you can address?”

No surprise – this is something I see too in the work we do with organisations. The executive team have said loud and clear that they want and NEED this kind of culture. They need time to focus on the strategic and empower their people to take a lead. They want to get out of the weeds and they know their people are capable of making these kinds of judgement calls.

So why isn’t it happening?

Saying versus seeing

Ownership isn’t created by telling leaders to ‘step up’.

Far more powerful is what they see when someone does make a decision which was previously pushed up to the executive team. Nine times out of ten they may be left to their own devices. But if one time in ten that decision is corrected or overridden the message is diluted.

Leaders have been told they can make decisions…but only if those are the decisions the executive team would have made. That trust is therefore conditional on ‘getting it right’.

A former client was continually frustrated by small but important errors in PowerPoint decks that would be seen by clients and the board. So she asked to see every deck before it went out. She corrected the mistakes, adjusted the language and formatting, and generally upgraded the visuals.

Each intervention made sense. But together they taught the team that quality was ultimately her responsibility and that a deck was not safe until she had approved it.

The more she checked, the more they pushed work upwards. The more they pushed work upwards, the more evidence she saw that they could not be trusted to get it right.

Both sides were behaving rationally. Together, they were creating dependency.

How is ‘failure’ treated when it occurs? As a learning opportunity? With curiosity? Or as evidence that trust was not deserved and more hands-on intervention from above is required?

Escalation is rational

Not only is escalation a rational response to this tension, but it’s what the executive team often want too. They want to be helpful. They want thorny issues to come to them. They don’t want to abdicate responsibility when their input and support on decision-making would be valuable.

And at times of great change in a business, the ‘right decision’ is more complex. The sands are shifting and the obvious answer might not be the right one in this new world. So, of course, leaders escalate. They want to be sure. And the executive team do too.

Which should make us question – is this a capability problem? Or a cultural one?

Decision rights matter, and being able to clearly articulate where decisions should be made is an important exercise, particularly during transformation where pace matters and you need everyone in the business to play their part in driving the strategy forward.

Research on organisational decision-making consistently associates clarity and distributed authority with better outcomes. But knowing who is authorised to decide does not necessarily mean they feel able to decide.

Transparency about decision-making authority won’t change the culture on its own. As I’ve written elsewhere, leaders revert to familiar habits under transformation pressure.”

Judgement develops through real decisions

The real change in behaviour comes with a change in the inter-relationship between the executive team and their people. It’s about what happens in that moment of escalation – either because the manager pushes the decision up or because the executive team is tempted to step in.

That moment is a signal for a new behaviour. Not a blanket “No – you’re empowered. Get on with it”. But a different kind of conversation.

The role of the executive team members changes. Instead of stepping in to help, fix or take on the decision themselves, they create space for thinking. In our work with senior finance leaders across the Welsh public sector, people developed judgement by working on real challenges through coaching, peer challenge and reflection.

What the executive team can do differently

• Ask, “What do you think we should do?” before providing an answer.

• Agree the circumstances in which a decision genuinely must be escalated.

• Review decisions for learning, including reasonable decisions that produced disappointing outcomes.

• Avoid quietly reclaiming authority when pressure increases.

What leaders receiving that authority can do differently

• Generate options with their teams before reaching a decision.

• Think enterprise-wide, considering the organisation’s objectives rather than only their own function.

• Ask executives for coaching and perspective rather than asking them to make the decision.

• Adapt decisions when new information emerges, rather than defending the original choice.

How you know ownership is growing

Holding this tension in those moments where the easiest thing to do is revert to the old decision-making habits is the key to successful cultural change. The nine times out of ten are the easy moments. But that tenth time – the sticky one where the answer is neither obvious nor easy – is the moment where both parties prove they mean it.

In our work with FA Education, the lasting shift came when leaders and teams increasingly took responsibility for shaping the culture themselves.

Over time, when both the executive team and their senior people play their part, decisions are made closer to the work, people can explain their reasoning, mistakes surface earlier, and senior leaders spend more time on genuinely enterprise-level questions.

Leadership creates more leadership when people leave an interaction more capable of making the next decision themselves.

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If you want to discuss this approach and how it could be addressed at your next event drop me a line blaire@thatpeoplething.com and we’ll get a meeting in the diary.