When your leaders aren’t taking ownership, what’s actually getting in the way?
Last week, we partnered with BNZ to bring together a group of founders and CEOs to talk about how decision-making and leadership need to evolve as businesses grow.
Before the session, we asked the group what was getting in the way. A few themes came through consistently: too many decisions were still finding their way back to the founder or CEO, ownership and accountability were becoming less clear, and there were questions about whether the leadership capability in the business was ready for what came next.
What was interesting was how connected those challenges were. When ownership is unclear, decisions escalate. When leaders get fewer opportunities to make decisions, they get fewer opportunities to build judgement. That can reduce confidence in their ability to make the call, which sends more decisions back to the top.
One of the lenses Sam shared during the session was to look at four areas before assuming the issue sits with the person: clarity, capability, confidence and conditions.
Clarity is about whether people understand where the business is going, what matters most right now and what they are accountable for. As organisations grow, the context that once moved naturally through a small team becomes harder to hold onto, and unclear priorities or ownership can make even capable leaders hesitate.
Capability is whether someone has the experience and judgement the role now requires. Sometimes this genuinely is the gap. The role may have grown faster than the person, or the business may now need a level of experience that simply wasn’t required a year ago.
Confidence is about whether people know they genuinely have the mandate to make the call. Leaders can have the capability and still escalate decisions if they expect to be second-guessed or overridden. Building ownership means giving people real authority within clear boundaries, as well as enough opportunity to build judgement through making decisions themselves.
Conditions are everything around the role that makes good decision-making easier or harder. Structure matters, but so do decision rights, information flow and operating rhythms. As businesses grow, more decisions also start to sit across functions, which is often where ownership gets messy. Several teams can have a legitimate interest in an outcome while nobody clearly owns it end to end.
That distinction matters because something that looks like a performance problem can have a very different cause underneath it. Hiring someone more senior may help when capability is the gap. It will have much less impact if the real issue is unclear accountability, limited authority or an operating model that makes good decisions difficult.
A good place to start is to look at a few decisions that have recently found their way back to you and ask what was actually getting in the way. Was the ownership clear? Did the person have enough experience or context to make the call? Did they know they had the authority to decide? Or had the way the business works around them made the decision harder than it needed to be? You may start to see a pattern.
As businesses grow, the aim is to create the conditions for good decisions to happen at the right level, while continuing to build the judgement of the people making them.
And sometimes the question is less “why won’t my leaders take ownership?” and more “what might be getting in the way?”
