Who Should Be Making That Decision?
Chris March returns to the LevelUp Podcast
Most leaders will tell you that decisions should be made as close to the action as possible. Ask any senior executive in any boardroom and they will nod along with conviction. And then they will go back to their desk and become the bottleneck.
That gap, between what leaders believe and what they actually do, was at the heart of a recent conversation I had with executive coach and advisor Chris March on the Level Up Leadership podcast. Chris works with founders and leadership teams across Australia and the US, and he sees this pattern constantly. The people who built something from scratch, who drove success through sheer personal bandwidth, often find it hardest to let go. Not because they are control freaks. Because they care deeply.
But caring deeply is not the same as leading effectively. And at some point, the two come into conflict.
The Bottleneck Problem
The higher you sit in an organisation, the more your instinct is to stay close to every significant decision. That instinct made sense when you were closer to the front line. It made sense when the organisation was smaller and your judgement was the fastest path to the right answer. But organisations grow, complexity increases, and the same instinct that served you well then starts to create drag.
Chris described it simply: if every decision has to travel up to you before anything can move, you have not built a business, you have built a dependency. Every delay carries a cost. Engineers pause mid-project. Sales teams lose momentum. Market opportunities close. That cost rarely shows up neatly on a balance sheet, but it compounds quietly and consistently.
In Enhanced Leadership, I ask leaders to sit honestly with the question: am I focused on doing the work, or enabling the work? The two feel similar from the inside, but they produce very different organisations. Doing the work feels productive. Enabling the work is what actually scales.
Three Triggers Worth Knowing
So how do you build a structure that allows people to move with confidence while still ensuring you are informed when it matters? Chris offered one of the clearest frameworks I have heard: give people the autonomy to make decisions, but define three specific triggers that require escalation. Is there a financial impact? Is there a customer impact? Is there a people impact? If none of those three apply, the decision belongs to the person closest to it. If one of them applies, that is when the next layer up needs to be involved.
That clarity does something important. It removes ambiguity, which is one of the main reasons people escalate unnecessarily. If your team do not know where the line is, they will always err on the side of caution and bring decisions upwards. You end up overwhelmed not because people are incapable, but because no one told them what they were allowed to decide.
Alongside this, Chris emphasised the importance of delegating with genuine precision. Stating an outcome and a timeline. Thirty days. An email update. A clear definition of what done looks like. Without that specificity, two leaders can delegate in completely different ways, and their teams end up confused rather than empowered.
The One-Way Door Test
Not every decision deserves the same speed of thinking. Jeff Bezos popularised the idea of one-way doors and two-way doors, and it remains one of the most useful mental models I know. A two-way door is a decision you can walk back from if it goes wrong. A one-way door locks behind you.
For two-way door decisions, speed and autonomy are exactly right. The cost of a small mistake is a learning experience, not a catastrophe. On my very first podcast episode, I told the story of a manager who would not spend a few pounds replacing some light bulbs without waiting for approval. That is a two-way door with the handle practically falling off. The whole point of pushing decision-making down the organisation is to move quickly on exactly those kinds of calls.
One-way doors are different. When the stakes are high and the decision is hard to reverse, that is precisely when you slow down, bring in diverse perspectives and apply real deliberation. The mistake many leaders make is applying one-way-door caution to every decision they face. That is how procrastination disguises itself as rigour.
The Sanitisation Effect
One of the more uncomfortable truths Chris and I discussed is what happens to information as it travels upward through an organisation. By the time a message reaches the top, it has usually been cleaned up. Softened. Tidied. Not out of dishonesty, but because people present their best case. They want to reassure. They do not want to alarm unnecessarily. And so the senior leader ends up with a clear and positive picture that may not reflect reality on the ground.
This is why mechanisms that cut through the layers matter. Reverse mentoring, where an executive regularly sits down with someone much more junior, can surface the honest version of what is happening far more effectively than a quarterly survey. An open brief, like the example I shared of a leader who asked her middle managers to come and tell her what they thought mattered most, with no pro forma and no agenda, builds the kind of trust where people will actually tell you the truth.
For Coaches: What to Watch For
If you work with leaders on delegation and decision-making, the presenting issue is rarely the real one. Clients often come describing a structural problem, when the underlying issue is about identity. Their sense of self-worth is tightly bound to being the person who decides. Letting go feels like losing status, or losing control, or trusting in people who might not yet have proven themselves.
The question worth sitting with is not how do I delegate better? It is what am I actually afraid will happen if I do? That is usually where the real work begins.
Chris also made a point that cuts across cultures and geographies: everyone wants to be seen, heard, and valued. Before any strategy or framework lands, the human relationship has to be there. The leader who knows why each person turns up to work every day, what they care about and what they are trying to build, will always have more genuine buy-in than the one who relies on the authority of the org chart alone.
In a world increasingly shaped by AI, that human thread is not a nice-to-have. As Chris put it: AI is there to amplify your brilliance. The human connection is the edge that no algorithm can replicate.
If this resonated, you can explore more on decision-making, leadership under pressure, and you want to go deeper on leading with purpose in an AI-driven world, my book Enhanced Leadership is available at mybook.to/EnhancedLeadership.
If you want to connect with Chris you can find him on linkedin.com/in/christopherrmarch/ or at chrismarchcoaching.com
