Who Should Make Which Decisions in Your Team?

A practical tool and downloadable template to help determine decision authority.

For the most part, my work focuses on helping people figure out HOW to make good decisions. However, in an organization (or family! or any other group of people), the more urgent and conflict-prone question is often WHO should make which types of decisions, rather than how they should make them.

During a conversation with a client lately, I realized that this, too, is a decision that we can approach with the same frameworks and questions that are helpful for other decisions. In this case, the “alternatives” are people within the organization. In other words, each potential decision-maker is one option, and the main challenge is to define which criteria the decision-maker should fulfill in order to bear that responsibility. Once you have defined those criteria, it becomes much more straightforward to assign the right person the responsibility for any type of decision.

I’ve created a template to illustrate and support this process. You can download it here. The spreadsheet as it is here may be too sophisticated for many situations, but you can adapt that general idea, and use it in any way you choose to guide this process within your team. (You should also adapt the set of criteria and their importance weights as you see fit, but the example may help you get started. It was among others inspired by this article.)

Things to consider when you use this approach to determine who gets to make which decisions in your team:

If there are no trade-offs (i.e., some people score higher than others on all criteria), the decision authority can simply go to the person with the highest total score (Column G). However, if there are trade-offs (as in the example), don’t look only at the totals. Trade-offs between criteria often suggest a way to share the decision.

For this example, given these particular criteria:

• People with high expertise, but who are not affected by the decision (Team Member 2 in this example) could be advisors to the decision-maker.
• People who are not affected by the decision in their regular work, if all goes well, but who might be affected by fallout of negative consequences (Team Member 3 in the example), could get a veto role. In other words, the person higher in the chain of command/responsibility might want to let someone else, who is closer to the decision, develop and propose a solution, but they might want to reserve the right to approve it before it is implemented. Criterion 3 here would justify this kind of overseeing role for Team Member 3 for this particular decision (clearly distinguishing this case from a micro-managing leadership style in general).

A possible practical solution for this example:
Team Member 1 could create a proposal, advised by Team Member 2. Team Member 3 would have to approve the proposed solution before it is implemented.

If you have faced the question of “who should make which decisions” in your team, please let me know what you think about this process. I’d love to hear about your experience!

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR