You are in the middle of something important when a message comes through.
“Can I just check this with you before I reply to the client?”
A few minutes later, someone else asks whether they can approve a small cost. Then a manager wants your view on how to handle a supplier issue.
None of the questions is particularly difficult. In fact, that is part of the problem.
You hired capable people so you would not have to make every decision yourself, yet a surprising number of decisions still find their way back to you.
It is easy to conclude that the team needs more confidence or needs to “take more ownership”.
Sometimes that is true.
But often the problem is not the people. It is that the business has never made it sufficiently clear how decisions should be made when the owner is not in the room.
Delegating work is not the same as delegating decisions
Many owners have become reasonably good at delegating tasks.
Someone else manages the project, handles the customer, runs the campaign or prepares the proposal.
But when judgement is required, the decision comes back.
That means the work may have been delegated, but the authority has not.
Over time, everyone learns the same pattern: if there is uncertainty, ask the owner.
From the team’s perspective, that can be perfectly rational. Why risk getting it wrong when the person who ultimately cares most about the outcome is available to answer?
From the owner’s perspective, however, the cumulative effect is significant.
Five two-minute decisions do not feel like much. But spread across every day, every week and every part of the business, they fragment attention and keep the owner involved at a level they are trying to move beyond.
The solution is not simply telling people to “use their initiative”.
You need to understand why the decision came back in the first place.
Four reasons decisions keep coming back to the owner
I find it useful to separate these into four areas:
Authority. Confidence. Information. Habit.
The answer is often one of these, or a combination of them.
1. Authority
The person genuinely does not know whether they are allowed to make the decision.
Perhaps they can offer a customer a refund, but nobody has defined how much. They can agree project changes, but they are unsure when the commercial implications require approval. They can purchase something for the team, but do not know their spending limit.
So they ask.
That is not necessarily a confidence issue. It may simply be that decision rights have never been made explicit.
Owners often assume people know how much freedom they have because it feels obvious from the owner’s perspective.
It may not be obvious to the person carrying the responsibility.
2. Confidence
Sometimes people do have the authority, but they do not yet trust their own judgement.
This is especially common when someone has recently moved into management or taken on a wider role.
They may know that the decision is technically theirs, but still want reassurance that they are thinking about it in the right way.
The wrong response is to keep making the decision for them.
That gives short-term certainty but does little to build judgement.
A better response might be:
“What do you think we should do?”
“What options have you considered?”
“What would you recommend?”
“What is the risk if we get this wrong?”
Over time, the conversation moves from asking for an answer to testing their thinking.
That is how confidence develops.
3. Information
Sometimes the team cannot make the decision because they simply do not have the information the owner has.
The owner may know the history of the customer, the commercial context, an earlier agreement, the margin on the job or why a particular exception was made last time.
The team sees one situation.
The owner sees the wider picture.
If that information remains in the owner’s head, the decision will continue to come back.
This is an important distinction because the answer is not more delegation. It is better access to information.
4. Habit
Then there are decisions that come back simply because they always have.
The team asks.
The owner answers.
The problem gets solved.
Nobody stops to question whether the owner needed to be involved at all.
This is perhaps the easiest category to miss because there is no obvious failure. The process works.
It is just unnecessarily dependent on one person.
Habits like this can survive long after the business has outgrown them.
Try the five-decision test
A simple exercise can quickly show you where the issue lies.
Think about the last five decisions that came back to you which, ideally, you would not have needed to make.
Write them down.
For each one, ask:
- Authority: Did the person genuinely not know whether they were allowed to decide?
- Confidence: Did they know it was their decision but lack confidence in their judgement?
- Information: Were they missing something important that I knew?
- Habit: Did they come to me simply because that is what we normally do?
You may find that one category dominates.
That matters because each one requires a different response.
If the issue is authority, clarify decision rights.
If it is confidence, coach rather than answer.
If it is information, improve access to the knowledge required.
If it is habit, start changing the pattern.
Telling everyone to “take more ownership” will not solve all four.
Make decision rights clearer
One of the simplest improvements is to be explicit about different levels of authority.
For example:
Decide
You own this decision. Make it and move on.
Decide and inform
Make the decision, then let me know what you have done.
Recommend
Assess the situation and bring me your recommended course of action.
Escalate
This is significant enough that I need to be directly involved.
The categories themselves are less important than the clarity they create.
The team knows where it stands, and the owner knows which decisions should still reach them.
Without that clarity, people tend to default towards safety.
And safety often means asking the owner.
Define the boundaries, not every possible answer
The objective is not to produce a rulebook covering every eventuality.
Businesses are too messy for that.
Instead, define the boundaries around recurring decisions.
For example, rather than telling someone exactly how to handle every customer complaint, you might define:
- what outcome you are trying to protect;
- the maximum value they can authorise;
- situations that must be escalated;
- commercial considerations they should take into account;
- what should be recorded afterwards.
That gives people room to use judgement without making them guess where the limits are.
Good decision design creates freedom inside sensible boundaries.
Make the owner’s thinking more visible
A lot of owner dependency exists because experienced owners make decisions intuitively.
They have seen similar situations dozens of times. They recognise patterns that may not be obvious to somebody else.
Ask an owner why they made a particular decision and the initial response is often:
“It just felt like the right thing to do.”
But underneath that instinct is usually experience.
What were you noticing?
What made this case different?
What risks were you weighing?
What would have made you choose the opposite course?
Those are valuable questions because they begin to turn personal judgement into business capability.
You are not trying to create a robotic decision tree.
You are helping other people understand what good judgement looks like in your business.
Review decisions rather than making them all
There is also an important difference between making a decision and reviewing one afterwards.
If a manager is developing, you might initially ask them to make the decision and explain their reasoning to you.
Over time, you may only review exceptions.
Eventually, you may not need to be involved at all.
That progression builds capability while maintaining sensible oversight.
It also gives the owner something many lack: visibility without constant intervention.
This is where practical AI starts to become interesting
Once the business understands how recurring decisions should be made, AI can become genuinely useful.
Not because AI should replace human judgement.
And not because an AI agent should be allowed to make every business decision automatically.
The opportunity is to make good judgement easier to access and apply.
For example, AI can help gather relevant information before someone makes a decision. It can summarise customer history, extract important points from documents, surface previous examples, prompt the user with agreed questions or compare the situation with defined criteria.
It can also help turn repeated owner knowledge into something the team can use more consistently.
A manager faced with a familiar type of decision could potentially be guided through the same questions the owner would normally ask, rather than immediately escalating it.
Agentic AI takes that a step further. In the right situation, an agent could monitor a workflow, recognise that a decision is required, gather the relevant information, prompt the appropriate person and then trigger the next agreed action.
But the sequence matters.
You cannot sensibly automate decision-making that nobody has properly thought through.
First clarify the judgement. Then decide how technology can support it.
Otherwise, AI simply makes an unclear process happen faster.
Do not automate the owner’s involvement by accident
There is another trap here.
A business can adopt better technology while leaving the owner dependency completely intact.
For example, a new system might automatically send the owner an approval request every time a particular event occurs.
Technically, the process has been automated.
Practically, the owner is still the bottleneck.
That is why the better question is not:
“Can we automate this?”
It is:
“Why does this decision need to come to me at all?”
Sometimes it should.
Many decisions genuinely belong with the owner because of their commercial significance, risk or strategic importance.
But many others remain there because nobody has deliberately redesigned them.
Your decision-making structure should evolve as the business grows
The decisions an owner should make in a five-person business are not the same as the decisions they should make in a 20-person or 50-person business.
As the business grows, the owner’s decision-making role should become narrower but more important.
Less time on:
- routine approvals;
- operational exceptions;
- small spending decisions;
- everyday customer questions;
- decisions managers are capable of making.
More time on:
- strategic direction;
- significant investment;
- major commercial risks;
- senior appointments;
- business model choices;
- priorities and resource allocation.
If that shift does not happen, the owner remains busy while the business becomes increasingly complicated around them.
Start with the decisions that interrupt you most
You do not need a grand decision-management project.
Start small.
For the next week, make a note every time somebody asks you to make, approve or validate a decision you believe they could eventually handle themselves.
Then review the list.
Which ones are about authority?
Which are about confidence?
Which are about missing information?
Which are simply habit?
Choose one recurring category and redesign it.
Clarify the boundary. Share the information. Coach the person. Agree what needs escalating.
Then see what happens.
A handful of better-designed decisions can remove a surprising amount of day-to-day dependence.
The goal is not fewer decisions. It is better-placed decisions
A growing business will always have decisions to make.
In fact, growth usually creates more of them.
The question is whether those decisions are being made at the right level by people who have enough authority, information and judgement to handle them well.
If every meaningful decision still needs the owner, the business may have delegated activity without really distributing responsibility.
That is a difficult way to scale.
The aim is not for the owner to stop making decisions.
It is for the owner to stop making decisions that no longer require the owner.
That is an important difference.
At Summit SCALE, this is increasingly part of the work I am doing with owners: identifying where decisions, knowledge and judgement are still unnecessarily concentrated around them, then redesigning how the business handles those situations — using clearer management practices, better systems and practical Agentic AI where it genuinely adds value.
If too many decisions are still coming back to you, try the five-decision test first.
You may discover that the problem is not that your team needs to take more ownership.
It is that the business needs to make ownership easier.
