Empowering Decisions
Mastering the Art of Setting Guard Rails in High-Stakes Leadership
Recently, I delved into the philosophy of Act Like You Own It, emphasising the vital importance of empowering everyone within an organisation to feel confident and capable of making decisions, regardless of their level.
My argument was simple yet powerful: to truly embody that sense of ownership and autonomy, every individual needs to feel empowered. Since then, a few people have rightly raised a crucial question: is that truly realistic, especially in the public sector, or indeed, in any organisation where decisions can have profoundly serious consequences?
Its a valid challenge, and one that deserves a deeper dive. My answer remains an unequivocal and resounding yes – this philosophy absolutely applies across all sectors.
Decision-making at the appropriate level is not merely a nice-to-have or a progressive HR initiative; it is an absolutely essential pillar of effective leadership and operational efficiency. And nowhere is this more acutely felt than in public service.
Why? Because the sheer volume, complexity, and often, the immediate sensitivity of the issues being dealt with demand an agility and responsiveness that can only truly come from empowered individuals at every level of the organisation.
We simply cannot afford bottlenecks, delays, or a culture of paralysis by analysis when peoples lives, their well-being, and their fundamental rights are directly impacted by our actions.
Think of a worker needing to make a rapid assessment in a crisis, or a healthcare professional making a critical intervention. Waiting for multiple layers of approval can, quite literally, have devastating consequences.
The genuine art and science of leadership in this context lies in how senior leaders strategically set the thresholds for decision-making and, critically, how they ensure robust and clearly understood guard rails are firmly in place for those decisions where outcomes potentially carry the most serious consequences.
This is about striking a delicate, yet essential, balance between empowering autonomy and mitigating unacceptable risk. Lets revisit the retail analogy from my previous post to illustrate the spectrum of stakes involved. In organisations like the ones I worked in earlier in my career, the immediate stakes, while significant for individuals involved (think livelihoods, careers, professional reputations, even mental well-being due to stress), are rarely about life or death, or decisions that could result in severe physical or emotional harm to a customer in the same direct way. A wrong order, a stock-out, or even a poor customer service interaction typically wont have the same grave immediate repercussions as, say, a flawed medical diagnosis. That’s not a value judgment on the importance of any sector, merely a pragmatic acknowledgement of the inherent nature of the immediate impact.
In such environments, the threshold for autonomous decision-making can and, indeed, should be set quite low. People should be actively encouraged and explicitly allowed to make mistakes when those mistakes aren’t going to lead to severe, irreversible consequences for the business or its customers. The philosophy is often: Fail fast, learn faster. There’s nearly always a tomorrow where you can recover those losses, apply the lessons learned, and build back stronger.
For instance, a junior manager might experiment with a new product display that doesn’t quite work, or misjudge the staffing levels for a quiet period. These are learning opportunities. The guard rails here should be loosely applied, with a greater emphasis on retrospective checks and balances, and post-action reviews that focus on learning rather than blame. Strict guard rails should largely be reserved for situations where someone might maliciously, fraudulently, or intentionally act for their own personal gain, or where significant financial assets are at stake.
The landscape shifts dramatically, however, in highly regulated organisations, particularly those in fields like or healthcare or air traffic control. These are environments where making a mistake of the wrong magnitude could realistically result in loss of life, significant injury, severe emotional trauma, or profound societal consequences.
We acknowledge that such extreme outcomes, while devastating, represent the very thin end of the wedge in terms of frequency and likelihood. Most decisions, even in these sectors, do not carry such catastrophic potential. Its typically only in the most critical, complex, or rapidly evolving situations, or in cases of repeated, unaddressed, and systemic errors over time without learning or recovery, that such severe harm would typically materialise.
As senior leaders in these incredibly high-stakes environments, your paramount responsibility is a clear-eyed and rigorous identification of those critical areas – those specific types of decisions or actions that carry the highest potential for severe harm. Once identified, robust, unambiguous, and non-negotiable guard rails must be put firmly in place around them.
These guard rails will likely take the form of:
Strict Policies and Protocols: Clearly defined, detailed policies and standard operating procedures that leave no room for ambiguity in critical scenarios.
Explicit Guidance and Mandates: Unwavering expectations and mandatory guidelines for actions in high-risk situations.
Tiered Authorisation Levels: Clearly stipulated levels of authority for certain decisions, often requiring senior sign-off or multi-agency agreement.
But simply having these policies on paper is far from sufficient. It is incumbent upon senior leaders to then ensure three fundamental pillars are robustly supported:
Make Expectations Crystal Clear and Understood: Firstly, and perhaps most vitally, ensure that these critical expectations are not just written down and circulated, but are crystal clear, universally understood, and truly embedded within the everyday practice and culture of everyone in the organisation. This requires ongoing communication, active listening to feedback, and regular reinforcement. There should be no ambiguity whatsoever about where the absolute lines are drawn, and what the non-negotiables are. For example, a clear policy on reporting safeguarding concerns, with no exceptions, and regular training on exactly what constitutes a concern and the reporting process.
Provide Robust Training, Support, and Supervision: Secondly, make sure that comprehensive, high-quality, and ongoing training and continuous professional development are in place. Everyone must have the tools, the knowledge, the skills, and the practical experience necessary to meet those critical expectations consistently and competently. This includes not just initial induction training, but regular refreshers, access to expert advice, mentoring, and rigorous, consistent professional supervision. In a public service context, this might mean regular case reviews, peer support networks, and access to legal or clinical guidance when complex situations arise.
Enforce Boundaries Without Exception and with Proportionality: And thirdly, arguably most importantly of all for building trust and maintaining safety, ensure that those critical boundaries are robustly enforced without exceptions. There must be proportionate, yet severe, consequences for staff who choose not to comply with them, especially where there is a clear disregard for policy or reckless behaviour leading to harm. This isn’t about creating a blame culture for genuine mistakes; its about holding individuals accountable for their professional responsibilities and, crucially, safeguarding the public and maintaining the integrity and reputation of the service. Consistency in enforcement builds trust in the system.
Anything below that clearly defined, high-consequence threshold, however, should not be treated with the same rigidity or lead to such severe punitive outcomes for failures. This is where the learning culture truly flourishes.
Anything below those critical guard rails should be explicitly embraced as a learning experience. If people make mistakes in these lower-stakes decisions – perhaps they misallocate resources slightly, or choose an less efficient but still effective approach, or even make an error in judgement that causes minor inconvenience but no serious harm – they should be allowed to make those mistakes as part of making decisions at the appropriate level. The organisations role here is to minimise blame, provide constructive feedback, and facilitate learning from these experiences.
This is how we cultivate an environment where people feel confident to take initiative, make decisions, learn from their missteps, and ultimately grow into more effective, more resilient, and more responsible professionals. Its about empowering people to truly own it, even when the stakes are high, by providing the clarity, support, and a just culture that allows them to do so safely, effectively, and with confidence. It is this balance that truly LevelsUp leadership across all sectors.
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