Ask Three People Who Decides. Then Brace Yourself.

Tuesday’s leadership meeting. Item four is the same item four from two weeks ago. The pricing on the new service line. The ops hire. The system everybody agrees the company has outgrown. Somebody gives an update that isn’t really an update. Heads nod. Somebody says we need to get this one done. The meeting moves to item five.

You’ve sat through that meeting. Maybe this week.

When a decision stalls like that, two explanations get offered. The process is broken, or somebody isn’t doing their job. Neither gets tested. So the fix becomes another meeting, the meeting produces more agreement, and the agreement produces nothing.

There’s a faster way to find out what’s stuck. It takes about a minute, and it costs nothing except what you might hear.

One question, asked three times, shows you what’s broken

Pick the decision that’s been stuck the longest. Ask three people, separately, one question. Who decides this?

Don’t look for who needs to be involved or who has an opinion. Ask who makes the call.

Three different answers means you have a process problem. When nobody agrees on who owns that decision, it floats. It surfaces in meetings, collects opinions, and lands with no one person who is accountable.

A decision without an owner can’t get made, no matter how many smart people talk about it.

If you get the same answer from all three, and still no movement after weeks? That’s when the process isn’t your problem. Everybody already knows whose call it is. The decision isn’t getting made, and now you know exactly where to look.

Two different problems, and they need two different fixes. Many companies spend months applying the process fix to a person problem. That’s why the new approval workflow changed nothing last time.

When you get three different answers

The scattered answers are the easier problem, so start there.

This one happens naturally in growing companies. Roles get built around activities instead of outcomes, so the job description covers what a person does all day and never says what they get to decide. Everyone half-knows who should own the call. Nobody ever wrote it down.

The fix is to go decision by decision and say plainly what each person gets to do. There are three clear levels. They give input while someone else decides. They decide on their own and inform people after. Or they own the decision completely and live with what follows. And some decisions shouldn’t sit at that level at all. You need to push them down to whoever on the team is closest to the work.

Write the level next to the decision and go through the list with your team so everyone knows who decides what. A lot of the floating stops right there. People don’t sit on decisions they know are theirs, and they quit waiting on decisions they know aren’t.

When all three name the same person

Now the harder version. Three people, same name, weeks of no action.

Watch what usually happens next, since it makes the problem worse. The company builds process around the person. I watched a CEO do this. Pricing exceptions in his company took two weeks to clear and he was tired of hearing about it, so he created an approval committee, put strong people on it, and gave it authority on paper. Months later, exceptions still took two weeks.

When he finally asked three of his people who approves them, all three gave him a version of the same answer. It ends up on your desk. The committee existed. Nobody used it. Everyone knew he’d overrule it anyway, so they skipped the step and walked it down the hall.

The fix started the day he believed those answers. He shut down the committee, named the one person who now approves exceptions alone, and quit answering when somebody walked one to his desk anyway. Within a month the wait was down to a couple of days.

Before you decide the person can’t handle it, look at what letting go would cost them. They got where they are by making exactly these kinds of calls, and making them well. The promotions came from that.

Now they’re being asked to hand that work to somebody else, and it feels like giving away the reason the company values them. Nobody admits to something like that. It’s easier to keep the decision close, stay buried in it, and let everyone around them call it a slow process.

And before you go asking, brace yourself. If you’re the one who built the company, there’s a good chance the name that comes back is yours. All three times.

In the early years you made every call, since there was nobody else to make them. Somewhere along the way the job changed, and the decision rights changed with it. Nobody announced either one.

And nobody warns you how much that feels like losing the thing you were best at.

What to do with this before Friday

Start with yourself. Pick the three decisions that have been stuck the longest and ask three people about each one. If the answers don’t match, sit down with the people involved and settle who owns it, at which level.

If your name comes back on all three, pick one. Go to the person who should own it and tell them it’s theirs now.

Then the hard part. Let them make it. And decide now what you’ll do the first time they make that call differently than you would have. Take the decision back in that moment, and everyone learns the decision rights were never real. The call they make doesn’t need to match the one you would’ve made. Their name is on it now.

Then give the test to your leadership team, since the same pattern lives at their level too. Ask each of them to pick their own stuck decision and put the same question to three of their people.

Have everyone bring back what they heard to the next meeting.

One more question before you close this.

Which stuck decision have you not asked about yet, and what are you afraid the three answers will be?