Episode 7 - Decision Rights, Not Decision Fights

Listen to Episode 7: Decision Rights, Not Decision Fights

Okay, picture this: Twelve executives are crowded around a conference table. They're trying to make a final decision on something.

Some of their voices are getting louder.

They're talking over one another.

A few of them are getting quieter.

And some have already checked the hell out of the conversation.

90 minutes later, the meeting ends with no decision having been made, except acknowledgement that they now need to meet again to repeat this same stupid scenario at least one more time. Talk about a waste of time and energy.

If that situation feels familiar, meetings that end in no decision and no progress, it's likely because it is familiar since most companies get decision-making wrong in a few very specific and very predictable ways.

In this article, I’ll talk about a study published in the July-August 2026 issue of Harvard Business Review called “What Companies Get Wrong About Decision Rights” by Lindy Greer, Jennifer Jordan, and Maxim Sitch. These 3 researchers have spent years advising and studying more than 100 companies on this exact problem, and they've identified four mistakes that keep showing up. I'm going to walk you through those four mistakes, compare a few of the decision-making frameworks companies use to try to fix the problem, and talk about when one model might be a better fit than another.

I'm also dive into something slightly off topic from the decision rights HBR article, but instead is specifically related to women and decision-making, so it's worth bringing up. I'll be highlighting the collaborative, participative decision-making style, which is the kind of decision-making most often associated with women leaders, and how that style fits into the world of decision rights and decision-making frameworks.

By definition, decision rights are rules and procedures that define who has the authority to make specific decisions or choices within an organization, who has to be involved in the decision-making process through consultation/providing input, and who then takes the final actions once the decision's been made. Decision rights help to provide boundaries around what decisions can be made independently and which decisions require a more formal approval process. Clear decision rights, meaning everyone knows exactly who's deciding what, are crucial for collaboration. They prevent confusion, they speed up execution, and they cut down on conflict, especially in organizations with cross-departmental teams and projects, which let's face it, is the situation with most organizations these days.

There are a handful of decision-making tools or frameworks that exist to help companies define decision rights, and the 3 you'll run into most often are RACI, RAPID, and DARE. I'm going to quickly run through each at a high level so you understand the similarities and differences among the three.

RACI is the most common, and it's the framework that the decision rights HBR article centers on. RACI stands for responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed. The accountable person is the one who makes the final call and leads the decision team. The responsible people, usually only 2-4 people in the group, provide critical input and they'll debate the trade-offs of the different options with the accountable person. The consulted people bring an expertise that the core team doesn't have (they're like the subject matter experts), and the informed people aren't part of the decision-making process at all, but they need to know the outcome in order to do their jobs well.

RACI's real strength is in how it maps out execution alongside the decision itself, which makes it especially useful for complex, ongoing, cross-functional work where a lot of people need to stay in the loop. Its weakness, and this is a big one that I'll get into in more detail in a bit, is that people routinely confuse the accountable role with the responsible role. The researchers behind the HBR article that's serving as the basis for this article actually recommend flipping the order to ARCI, which puts the accountable role first, specifically to cut down on that kind of confusion. They argue that the accountable person is the one making the decision, so they should come first.

The RAPID framework is older, and it actually comes from a 2006 Harvard Business Review article by two Bain consultants, Paul Rogers and Marsha Blanco. RAPID stands for recommend, agree, perform, input, and decide. The person who recommends puts the proposal on the table. The people who agree have to sign off on it before it can move forward (this role is meant to be used sparingly because too many people with agreement power creates the decision-making gridlock that I'm going to talk more about today). This type of decision gridlock was modeled in the intro to today’s post with the 12 people sitting around a table. Input comes from anyone whose perspective helps shape the proposal without giving them a formal vote in the end result, and decide is the one person who brings it all to closure and makes the decision. If your problem is a small number of major but infrequent decisions that keep stalling at a specific point in your company hierarchy, RAPID tends to be the best model for you.

The third one, DARE, is the newest and leanest of the three. It's practitioner built and it's super popular in consulting. DARE stands for decide, advise, recommend, and execute. The deciders have the final say, full stop. The advisors weigh in with their expertise. The recommenders do the research and analysis that shapes the options. The execution stakeholders are the ones who carry out the decision. The DARE framework strips out the informed role entirely, and it is explicit in that only one group (the deciders) has the actual authority. That makes it faster and less prone to the accountable vs responsible confusion that trips up RACI. DARE tends to work best for fast, high-stakes, time-sensitive decisions where speed matters more than building organizational buy-in. One thing to note here, though, unlike RACI and RAPID, DARE doesn't trace back to a peer-reviewed source or academic study. It's more of a consulting world convention that's evolved through practice over time. That doesn't make it less useful, but it does mean that the evidence behind it is more anecdotal than the other two.

So, quick summary:

RACI for complex, cross-functional work where a lot of people need visibility into the outcome.

RAPID for major, infrequent, company-wide decisions that keep stalling at a specific point in the chain.

DARE for fast, high-stakes decisions where you need speed more than broad input.

None of these three frameworks is universally best. They're built for different problems and should be implemented accordingly, which is really the first mistake a lot of companies make before they even get to the four mistakes highlighted in the HBR article. They will settle on one framework and apply it as their “preferred model.” Or a team will just willy-nilly pick whichever framework they want (or are familiar with) instead of the one that best fits the actual decision.

For the rest of this article, I'm going to focus on RACI since that's what the HBR research is built around, but everything here applies just as well if your organization runs on RAPID or DARE instead.

Here's the thing, though: the decision-making tools themselves aren't really the problem here. The problem is that the tools get misunderstood, misused, or completely disconnected from how people actually behave when participating in the decision-making process.

So, now that all this background and foundational info is out of the way, let's finally get into the four common decision-making mistakes that are seen most often in organizations.

Mistake #1: Assigning roles before clarifying the goal

When teams try to assign decision roles before they've actually nailed down the goal, things tend to devolve into ego-driven turf wars. Sometimes a goal is too broad, and that could look something like: the goal is create a strategic plan for this specific product line.

With no breakdown in the actual steps underneath it, this goal is meaningless. As an aside here, if you want some tips on how to set a functional and valuable strategic plan with goals, I'd recommend reading Episode 3: Why Women are Seen as Being Less Strategic and What to Do About It.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, a goal can be too narrow or insignificant for it to even be worth fighting over in the first place.

Either way, when the goal is fuzzy or immaterial, it becomes almost impossible to say who owns what, and that is what breeds the conflict in the decision making.

The company at the center of the HBR study used as the basis for this article ran into this issue. Their CEO, Head of HR, and several business unit leaders all believed that they owned responsibility for the decisions being made about headcount at the company. When the researchers of the study dug in, they found a tangle of headcount-related decisions that had never actually been separated out from each other. Once they broke the overall umbrella of headcount decisions into specific and distinct decisions, like who approves the annual budget for headcount vs who approves an individual new hire, the ownership became obvious, and a lot of the existing conflict dissolved on its own.

When you break it down from who makes decisions on headcount to who decides the budget, who approves a new hire, it kind of all just works out on its own. The solution here, at least when it comes to a goal and roles in the decision making is to get everyone involved to the point where every single person can state the specific, measurable, time-bound goal before anyone even touches a role assignment. The best teams go back and forth between defining the goal and assigning the roles, and then refine both as they go. But you have to, have to, have to start with the goal. Every single person in that room needs to understand the ultimate desired result before you even start to talk about who's going to take responsibility for what.

Mistake #2: Treating decision rights as a spreadsheet handed down from above.

This one is huge and it is so, so common.

A leader defines who's responsible for what, documents it, hands it to their team, and just assumes that everyone will fall in line and follow suit. In reality, it is rarely that smooth. Example: A senior marketing leader is trying to fix alignment problems between her central and regional teams. She unilaterally decides who owns which decisions and sends the list to her direct reports. Because nobody on her team had been a part of creating this document and making this decision, several people just decided that they weren't going to play the role they'd been assigned. As a result, the collaboration problem that she was trying to solve got worse instead of better because people were just like, “yeah, no, I'm not doing this.” The solution to this issue, meaning treating decision rights as a spreadsheet handed down from above, is to co-create the role assignments instead of dictating them. Bring the people who will actually live with the decision into the room to hash it out. This is where power sharing becomes really visible. Leaders have to be willing to step back into a responsible or consulted role when that's what the decision calls for, and step forward into the accountable role when the team genuinely needs them to make the call.

Just because you are technically in a leadership role doesn't mean you are the one who should be accountable for making a decision all the time. Make sure the right person or people are assigned into the accountability role.

Mistake #3: Not agreeing on what each role actually means.

Even when roles are assigned, teams often don't agree on what those roles actually mean. In a workshop that the HBR researchers ran with 30 partners at a consulting firm (and this consulting firm had used the RACI framework for years), they asked a simple question of these partners: Who has the final say in a decision? The accountable person or the responsible person?

The room split almost 50-50 with their answers, and that is wild for a firm that had been using that model for years. You'd think they'd be experts on the roles and what they meant. They were not.

The solution to this issue is to build simple behavioral descriptions of each role. Not just a title, not just responsible, accountable, consulted, and input, but state what that person and what that role actually does. How the accountable person gathers input, runs the debate, makes the decision, shows up to meetings. All of that. Once people know what their role actually looks like in action instead of just in name, it becomes much more manageable and tangible to put into practice, so make sure you're all on the same page about what each role requires and what is expected.

Mistake #4: Getting stuck in the same role regardless of the decision being made.

This last mistake happens when people default into the same role over and over again, regardless of what the actual decision calls for.

Sometimes senior leaders are always accountable, and everyone below them is always responsible, whether or not that makes sense for the specific decision in front of them. Other times, someone acts accountable even when they're not formally in that role, and that usually ends up happening because their boss is kind of hovering in the background trying to act like the decision maker, even though they're not technically involved. It's a good example of controlling behavior.

The HBR research includes a pretty costly example of getting stuck in the same role, regardless of decision, and this example was with a venture capital firm. In this situation, the venture capital firm's senior partner dominated an entire deal evaluation and effectively made the final call on the evaluation himself, based on his general experience and position in the company. He did this despite the fact that his junior associate was the one who had done the actual due diligence, and was the one who was advocating for the deal. Based upon the situation, the junior associate is the one who should have held the accountable role. They were closest to the information and closest to the situation at hand.

The venture capital firm ended up passing on this investment that later became a massive success, all because the senior partner couldn't let go. He wanted to maintain control and make a decision when he was not the most informed person in the room.

The solution here is to be intentional about tailoring roles to the decision at hand instead of defaulting to whoever's highest on the org chart. Major company-wide calls might genuinely belong with senior leadership, but plenty of smaller local decisions, like an equipment purchase at a branch office, are better owned by whoever's closest to the details.

The researchers of this HBR article actually challenged the senior leaders they coached to identify just four decisions a year where they are truly the only right person to make the call. Their argument was that everything else is a candidate for them to step back and let someone else take the reins.

So, how do you put all of this into practice? That’s the million-dollar question!

First, co-create the roles instead of assigning them from the top. Get the people who will live with the decision into the room when the roles are being defined, not after the roles are defined. Too frequently, the people who have to live with the decision are left out of the process completely.

Second, write out what each role actually looks like in behavior, not just in title. Make sure the whole team has seen it, understands it, and agrees to it.

Third, revisit the roles regularly. Decision rights aren't a one-and-done exercise. As goals change, or conflicts come up, the roles may need to change a little bit too, and that's okay. These frameworks require bending. Don't jam yourself in to the point that it breaks.

Fourth, re-design your meetings around the roles you've assigned. The HBR study organization’s executive team eventually did this well. They held what they called a “meeting about meetings”, which you know we all love, but in this meeting about meetings, they agreed to stop inviting the whole department to every decision and they started building agendas.

The agendas were built around the actual goal of each item, who was accountable for it, and a real-time budget.

They set up a meeting structure with a few minutes to frame the decision, a chunk of time set aside for debate between the accountable and responsible people, and a few minutes at the end of the meeting for the actual decision to get made.

After each meeting, they gave each other feedback on how well they'd stuck to their roles.

That kind of structure is what turns a decision rights framework into something valuable that people actually use.

Now I'll touch on the gender thing that is off-topic from the HBR article, but relevant to this podcast/blog overall.

So, does gender play a role in any of this?

There's actually a well-established body of research on this, which always helps when trying to share information, and it starts with a classic 1990 (so long time ago at this point!) meta-analysis by Alice Eagley and Blair Johnson. This meta-analysis looked at leadership styles across more than 150 studies, and what Eagley and Johnson found was that women, across the board, including in real organizational settings, not just study labs, tend to lead more democratically and participatively, while men tend to lead more autocratically and directively.

Those 1990 findings are not considered dated either. A much more recent meta-analysis from 2024 found that women are rated as demonstrating more effective leadership behaviors overall when compared to men. Imagine that…Women demonstrating more effective leadership behaviors than men! Who could have ever imagined, right? (I'm being sarcastic, by the way, in case you couldn't tell)

So, what does this mean as it pertains to decision rights?

On the one hand, it's good news. The fixes that researchers recommend for most of these 4 mistakes, co-creating roles instead of dictating them, and bringing people into the room to hash things out together, is closer to how female leaders already tend to operate by default. If that's your natural style, you may find the co-creation piece of the framework comes more easily to you than it does to a leader who defaults to a more authoritarian “command and control” style.

On the other hand, it's important to pay attention and stay attuned to your blind spots. Remember mistake #1: an entire decision-making group crowded into a room because everyone assumed a decision needed the whole team present to have buy-in. So, applying this to women's tendencies to operate democratically and participatively, take note that a participative instinct, when taken too far, can look exactly like that crowded, unproductive meeting room. Being authentically and genuinely collaborative is an asset. Being unable to conclude a meeting with an actual decision because you think everyone needs a voice in everything falls into the category of ineffective behavior. If collaborative decision making is your natural strength, and for a lot of female leaders it is, the skill to work on isn't becoming more collaborative. The skill to work on is knowing when to stop being accountable* (with an asterisk because we need to give everyone a voice), and just be accountable. Co-create the roles, consult the people who should be consulted, and then when it's your name next to that A, when you are the accountable one, make the decision. Even if not everyone in the building got a vote on it. That's not a contradiction of collaborative or democratic or participative leadership. It's what actually makes the framework work. You're playing out your role as it needs to be played out. Ultimately, a decision has to be made and you did your best to get the info you needed from the people who mattered, and now it's your turn to make the decision. So make it.

Decision making doesn't have to be a power struggle, but it shouldn't be a free-for-all either. You need clear roles, roles that are built together, understood the same way by everyone, and revisited as things change. These things let a team move quickly and still allow people to be involved along the way. If you take nothing else from this post, take this: The next time a decision in your organization stalls, don't just ask what the decision is. Ask who's actually supposed to be making the decision and see whether everyone agrees on that answer. You'll usually find that that's where the real problem is hiding. Disagreement on who should be making the ultimate final decision.

I hope you found this content useful. I'm Lauren. This is Glass Ceiling Smashed. Go grab your hammer and let's break something together.

You can find the sources used to write this episode/article in the show notes for this episode linked at the beginning of this post.