Why do employees keep bringing decisions back to me?
A team can have nominal ownership while still learning that the safest way through uncertainty is to return the decision to the manager.
A decision lands with someone on the team. They bring you two options. You pick one. The work continues. The interaction feels efficient because the question was solved quickly.
But that quick answer can also become the rule for the next uncertain moment: bring the decision upward and let the manager absorb the risk.
After enough repetitions, the manager experiences a team that “will not decide,” while the team experiences a system in which the manager remains the final route through ambiguity.
The upward-routing loop
The first answer is the leverage point
The easiest place to change this loop is often not in a workshop about accountability. It is in the first response to a routine decision request.
If the manager immediately supplies the answer, the decision has already moved. If the manager instead asks for a recommendation, the reasoning, and the intended next move, the decision remains closer to its owner.
That does not mean refusing help. It means help no longer automatically includes taking the decision.
If you always finish the decision, the system learns to return unfinished decisions to you.
CHANGE ONE RESPONSE.
- 1When a routine decision returns, do not choose immediately.
- 2Ask for the owner's recommendation first.
- 3Ask what information the recommendation is based on.
- 4If it is inside the delegated boundary, let the owner make the call.
- 5Record only the decisions that genuinely required escalation.
Do not push responsibility downward when authority, information, or accountability have not moved with it. Ownership without the ability to decide is only a label.
Questions arrive as requests for your decision.
A recommendation arrives, but you still routinely replace it with your own choice.
Routine decisions arrive with a recommendation and stay with the owner.
The decision is outside the person's authority or meets an agreed escalation condition.
Decision ownership changes when the response to uncertainty changes.
Serkan Elbasan
Serkan Elbasan is the founder of the Institut für Kognetik and an independent researcher working on recurrence, structural invariance, rule–state separation and the formal conditions under which systems can modify their own rules.