Years ago, running IT operations for a Saskatchewan telecom, I watched a router replacement sit untouched for eleven days. The part was on the shelf. The change window was open. Two engineers were trained on it. Nothing happened, because every time someone reached for it they asked the same question out loud: “Are we sure we’re allowed to pull the trigger on this without sign-off?” Nobody was sure. So it waited. When I finally dug in, the cause wasn’t technical and it wasn’t a skills gap. Four people each believed a fifth person owned the call, and the fifth believed it was a team decision. The decision had no owner, so it had no movement.
That pattern has followed me through twenty-plus years of operations work and into fractional COO engagements. The single most expensive problem on most teams is not that decisions are hard. It is that nobody can tell you who owns them.
The slowness is measurable, and it’s getting worse
In November 2025, West Monroe surveyed more than 1,200 leaders, 214 C-suite executives and 1,000 managers, all at U.S. companies with at least $250 million in revenue. Nearly three in four (73%) estimated their organizations lose up to 5% of annual revenue to slow decision-making. Almost half of the C-suite (49%) said they had missed a major market opportunity in the previous twelve months. More than half (56%) said competitors beat them to market at least occasionally.
Here is the part worth sitting with. When the researchers asked what was actually slowing things down, executives blamed technology and skills. Managers, the people closer to the work, named something different: excessive approval layers, risk-averse leadership, and unclear decision rights. The report’s own conclusion was that leadership behavior, not tooling, is the biggest contributor to what it called the “Slowness Tax.”
McKinsey found the same disease in different clothing. In its survey of more than 1,200 global leaders, 61% said at least half the time they spend making decisions is wasted, and only 20% believed their organizations were good at decision-making at all. The firm put a number on it: at a typical Fortune 500 company, inefficient decision-making burns roughly 530,000 days of manager time a year, about $250 million in wages.
You will not fix a number that large with a better method for weighing options. The waste isn’t in the choosing. It’s in the wandering that happens before anyone is even allowed to choose.
What unclear decision rights look like on a real team
Decision rights sound like a governance term for big companies with org charts on the wall. On a small team it shows up as ordinary friction you have probably stopped noticing.
A request lands in three people’s inboxes and all three assume one of the others will handle it. The same vendor question gets answered two different ways in the same week because two people each thought it was theirs. A junior person waits outside your door to ask whether they can approve a $400 expense they are clearly qualified to approve. A project stalls for a week, not because anyone said no, but because nobody felt entitled to say yes.
Every one of those is the router on the shelf. The work is ready. The owner is missing.
I have come to believe this is the quiet engine behind a lot of problems managers mistake for other things. The manager who feels like a bottleneck on their own team usually is one, because every decision routes back to them by default. The team that seems to lack initiative often has plenty of it; they just don’t know which calls are theirs to make. The escalation that lands on your desk at 5 p.m. is frequently not a hard problem, it’s an ownership problem wearing a hard problem’s coat.
Name the owner before you refine the process
The fix is older than any of the survey data. In 2006, Bain’s Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko published “Who Has the D?” in Harvard Business Review, and the core idea has aged better than almost anything else written about management that decade. Their argument was blunt: decisions stall at predictable bottlenecks whenever there is ambiguity over who gets to decide. Their cure was to assign explicit roles for every meaningful decision, packaged as RAPID: Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, and Decide.
You do not need the full apparatus. For most managers leading a team of five to fifteen people, the whole framework collapses into one disciplined habit: for any recurring decision, name the single person who owns it, and name the people whose input is required before they decide. That’s it.
The two failure modes Bain warns about are the ones I see constantly. The first is more than one person holding the “D,” which produces deadlock dressed up as collaboration. The second is too many people holding a veto, which produces a decision so consulted it never actually gets made.
The word that matters is “single.” One owner per decision. Input from several, a veto from almost no one, the decision itself resting on exactly one set of shoulders. Clarity here is not the same as concentrating power. You can hand ownership to your most junior person if the decision is theirs to grow into. Clarity just means everyone knows whose call it is before the moment arrives, instead of discovering it during the delay.
Start with the four decisions that keep coming back
Do not try to map every decision your team makes. You will produce a spreadsheet nobody reads. Instead, look at the last month and find the decisions that recurred and stalled. For most teams, four categories cover the bulk of it.
Spending calls under a threshold. Pick a dollar figure your team members can approve without you. Write it down. The fact that you would “probably say yes anyway” is exactly why you should stop being asked.
Standard customer or stakeholder responses. When a client asks for the usual exception, who answers, and do they need to check with you first? If the answer has been the same for six months, the answer does not need you in it.
Prioritization when two urgent things collide. When work coming in outpaces capacity, someone has to decide what slips. If that someone is always you, your team has outsourced its judgment to your calendar. Deciding what your team does not take on is one of the highest-leverage calls a manager owns, and it is one you can teach others to make. I’ve written separately about why work intake is where team productivity is actually won or lost.
Process exceptions. “Can we skip step three this once?” Who owns that yes? Usually it should be whoever owns the process, not whoever is most senior in the room.
Write the owner next to each one. Say it out loud in a team meeting. Then watch how much stops landing on you.
What actually changes
The first thing that changes is speed, and you will feel it within a week. The router comes off the shelf. But the more durable change is what it does to your people. When someone knows a decision is genuinely theirs, they stop performing helplessness and start exercising judgment. They will make a few calls you would have made differently. That is the cost of admission, and it is far cheaper than being the only adult in the building who is allowed to decide anything.
This is also where decision rights connect to something larger. Giving people real ownership of decisions is the practical mechanism behind delegation that holds, and it is how leading through intent actually works. When you give a team the destination and let them own the decisions about how to get there, you are doing commander’s intent in miniature, one decision at a time. The clarity of “this is yours to decide” does more for initiative than any motivational speech.
Where managers get this wrong
Two mistakes are worth flagging, because I have made both.
The first is mapping ownership and then quietly clawing it back. You tell someone a decision is theirs, they make it, you dislike the outcome, and you overrule them. Do that twice and you have taught the whole team that “your decision” means “your decision until I disagree.” Ownership you reverse on a whim is worse than no ownership at all, because now people have to read your mood on top of doing the work. If you genuinely cannot live with a class of decisions going a way you would not choose, then it was never theirs. Be honest about that up front.
The second is treating this as a one-time exercise. Decision rights drift. People leave, scope changes, a new product line creates a category of call that nobody owns yet. The router-on-the-shelf situation regenerates. The fix is to revisit ownership when something stalls, not to write a perfect map once and laminate it. When you catch a decision sitting idle, the diagnostic question is no longer “what’s the hold-up.” It’s “who owns this, and do they know it.”
That single question, asked early and answered clearly, would have saved my team eleven days and a lot of standing around looking at a part on a shelf. It will save yours more than you think.
Related reading: why managers become bottlenecks, making faster and better calls under pressure, and giving direction without micromanaging.