Glossary
Decision Rights
Decision rights define who gets to make which decisions, and at what level, without needing sign-off from above. Setting them clearly is how a team stops routing every choice through one person: cheap, reversible decisions are pushed down with guardrails, while the rare, hard-to-reverse ones are deliberately kept for a more senior call.
Decision rights are the explicit agreement about who can make which decisions, at what threshold, without going up for approval. They answer a question most teams leave implicit: what am I allowed to decide on my own? When that question has no clear answer, people default to asking permission, and every choice queues behind the same person.
Clear decision rights sort decisions by two things — how reversible they are, and how much they cost. A useful frame, made famous by Amazon's Jeff Bezos in his shareholder letters, is the difference between two-way doors (reversible decisions you can walk back through if they turn out wrong) and one-way doors (hard or impossible to reverse). Two-way-door decisions should be delegated fast and made by whoever is closest to the work; only the rare one-way doors justify a slower, more senior call.
Why it matters
Unclear decision rights are one of the main reasons a manager or founder becomes the bottleneck the team waits on. If nobody knows the limits of their own authority, the safe move is always to check — so decisions concentrate, the queue at one desk grows, and work stalls the moment that person is away. "You can decide anything under £X and inside this scope" frees both sides at once.
In practice
Decision rights work best when paired with named ownership. Deciding who holds a right is really deciding who is accountable for the outcome of that choice. Several structured approaches exist for mapping this on bigger decisions — Bain's RAPID model, for example, separates who Recommends, Agrees, Performs, Inputs and Decides — but the everyday version is simpler: write down the few decisions that genuinely need a senior call, and hand the rest down with a clear guardrail.
Frequently asked
What is an example of a decision right?
Who should own decision rights?
How are decision rights different from delegation?
Related
How to Stop Being the Bottleneck Your Team Waits On
You become the bottleneck when too many decisions and too much context route through you alone. The way out is to make your expectations predictable, push decision rights down with clear guardrails, and let people act from their remit rather than waiting for instruction — so work moves when you're not in the room.
TermAccountability vs Responsibility
Responsibility is for doing the work; accountability is for the outcome. Several people can be responsible for the tasks, but one person is accountable for whether the result actually lands. Responsibility can be shared and handed around; accountability cannot be divided without disappearing — which is why every important outcome needs a single accountable owner.
TopicDelegation: How to Hand Over Work So It Actually Holds
Effective delegation means handing over an outcome — not just a task — with a clear standard, sensible constraints and the right check-ins, so the work comes back finished rather than bouncing back to you. Done well, it raises a team's capacity and lowers the manager's role as bottleneck.
TermLadder of Accountability
The ladder of accountability is a model that ranks how people respond to a problem, from the lowest rung of ignorance, blame and excuses up to the highest rungs of owning reality, finding solutions and acting on them. Popularised by The Oz Principle (Partners In Leadership), it shows accountability as a posture you choose, rung by rung.