Leadership glossary
What is a decision rights framework?
When nobody has written down who owns a decision, it goes to the most senior person who'll take it. Do that a few hundred times a month and your senior team spends its week approving things it shouldn't need to see.
A decision rights framework is a simple, written agreement about who makes which decisions, who must be consulted and who just needs to be told. It stops decisions drifting upwards by default.
Also known as: decision rights matrix, decision rights model, decision ownership.
A plain definition
A decision rights framework lists the recurring decisions in a team or business and names who owns each one. For each decision it's clear who decides, who has to be consulted first and who simply needs to know the outcome.
It's different from a job description. Job descriptions list tasks. Decision rights say who has the authority to say yes.
Decision rights matrix vs RACI
A RACI chart maps who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed for tasks and projects. A decision rights matrix is narrower and sharper: it focuses on the calls that keep getting escalated.
Many teams find a three-level version easier to use: decide and act, decide and tell, or recommend and wait. It's quick to agree and easy to remember.
An example
Take spending. A team lead might decide and act on anything under '$5,000', decide and tell their manager on anything up to '$25,000', and recommend and wait above that. Suddenly most requests never need to climb the hierarchy.
The same approach works for hiring, pricing exceptions, customer refunds and project changes.
How to build one
Log a fortnight of decisions that land with senior people. Group them, then agree the lowest level that has the information to make each call well. Write it on a single page and review it after six weeks.
The payoff is measurable. Managers we work with typically make 40% more decisions at the right level and see 15% fewer escalations.
Questions leaders ask about a decision rights framework
Who should own a decision?
The lowest level that has the information, the skills and the accountability to make it well. Seniority alone isn't a good reason to own a decision.
Is a decision rights framework the same as delegation of authority?
They overlap. A delegation of authority policy usually covers financial limits. A decision rights framework covers every recurring call, including people, customer and operational decisions.
How often should decision rights be reviewed?
Check them after six weeks, then whenever the team, structure or strategy changes. If the same decisions keep coming back up, the framework needs adjusting.
More from the leadership glossary
These patterns tend to travel together. Simplify to Amplify is the method we use to find the friction and remove it, and AMPLIFY is how we apply it across a whole management layer.
- What is leadership friction?Leadership friction is the drag that builds up when decisions, approvals and information have to keep passing back through a manager before anything can move. It is the daily resistance that slows a capable team down, even when everyone is working hard.
- What is the bottleneck manager?A bottleneck manager is a leader through whom too many decisions and too much work must pass, so the team slows to the speed of that one person. The manager is not the cause of the problem so much as the point where it collects.
- What is firefighting leadership?Firefighting leadership is a pattern where a manager spends most of their time reacting to urgent problems instead of leading the important work. Every day is spent putting out fires, and the causes of those fires never get addressed.
- What is effective delegation?Effective delegation is handing over a whole outcome, along with the authority to make the decisions it needs, so the work gets done well without coming back to you. It is about transferring ownership, not just tasks.
- What is high performance leadership?High performance leadership is the practice of getting sustained, excellent results from a team without burning it out. It combines clear direction, real ownership and healthy standards so people do their best work over the long run, not just in short bursts.
- What is the escalation trap?The escalation trap is a pattern where a team routinely brings decisions up to the manager that it is capable of making itself. It feels like diligence, but it slowly turns the manager into a bottleneck and leaves the team unable to act on its own.
- What is manager effectiveness?Manager effectiveness is how well a manager gets results through their team rather than by doing the work themselves. You can see it in four numbers: time spent on work the team could do, avoidable escalations, how long people wait for sign-off, and how often peers solve problems without them.
- What is micromanagement?Micromanagement is when a manager controls how work gets done in so much detail that the team can't decide or act without them. It usually comes from unclear standards and a lack of trust in the system, not from a bad personality.
- What is span of control?Span of control is the number of people who report directly to one manager. The right number depends less on headcount and more on how many decisions those people need from the manager each week.
- What is middle management?Middle management is the layer of managers between the senior team and frontline staff. They turn strategy into daily work, and when they're stuck in the weeds the whole business slows down.
- What is upward delegation?Upward delegation is when work or decisions that belong to a team member end up back with their manager. It often starts with a well-meant 'leave it with me' and ends with a manager doing their team's work.
Explore related topics
Put this into practice
Concrete next steps to work on a decision rights framework in your own team.
Next steps: Find what's slowing your managers down or Check how much runs through you.