Who Owns The Decision?

The other day I was at a slightly larger company where we were discussing a process which was pretty broken. Everyone agreed that the process didn’t work and needed changing — but when I asked whom I need to talk to, to get this changed, I received the ominous answer: “Someone higher up in the org.” After asking multiple times who that is (so that I can talk to him or her), it was still not clear who the actual decision maker was — and yet there were good people following a process they agreed was broken.

I have seen this movie play out a whole bunch of times over the years. Once an organization becomes big enough that not everyone can be in one room anymore; some people tend to push their responsibilities higher up the food chain (sometimes to a point where nobody even remembers who the decision maker is or was — like in a Kafka novel).

It is a dangerous thing to happen to any company as it makes the company less effective, stupid and ultimately disempowered.

I am a huge fan of extreme ownership: Everybody is empowered to make decisions. And everybody owns those decisions and their outcomes. All the teams I ever worked with, which have established a culture of ownership soar — their performance, moral and satisfaction is up and they stop engaging in broken processes.

This post is part of the “The Heretic”, Pascal Finette’s insights into leadership in exponential times. For entrepreneurs, corporate irritants and change makers. Raw, unfiltered and opinionated — delivered straight to your inbox. You will like it. → https://theheretic.org