Many leaders who excel early in their careers eventually become the very reason their organizations stall. The individualistic traits that once fueled their success, like solving problems through personal effort, making rapid decisions based on instinct, and driving outcomes through sheer will, often become liabilities in more complex environments that call for scale.
One of the most persistent traps I’ve seen leaders fall into is continuing to make the bulk of important strategic decisions themselves instead of spreading out the responsibility. When the organization eventually outgrows individual heroics, scalable systems that enable shared decision-making must take their place. But leaders who equate value with decision-making struggle to let go, becoming bottlenecks to their own vision.
Here’s why typical approaches to decision-making fall short in today’s fast-changing environment—and how to create a more resilient system that allows others to confidently make strategic decisions without you.
Systems Reward Individual Heroics
From school to the C-suite, we’re taught that value comes from having the right answer and producing individual results. We reward those who solve problems, not those who build systems that prevent them. Over time, leaders internalize a dangerous belief that their worth lies in what they do alone, not in what they enable.
That identity becomes especially brittle in messy, unpredictable environments where past success patterns don’t apply. The very strengths of pattern recognition, decisive action, and personal ownership that helped leaders rise can become liabilities as complexity increases. The real shift is from hero to architect: clarifying intent, codifying principles, and building decision systems others can use without you.
Consider two contrasting examples of leaders I advised. David built his company from the ground up. A charismatic, tireless founder, he drove every major decision, solved every critical problem, and personally rallied the team through every crunch. His formula of effort, instinct, and will worked in the early days. But it didn’t scale. As the company grew, that same approach became a liability. Growth stalled. Talent left. Exit interviews revealed a pattern: People weren’t leaving the mission; they were leaving the lack of autonomy and control over their work.
David kept pushing, convinced success just required more of what had worked before. But he was trapped in a common pattern of trying to do everything instead of focusing on the few things that matter most. Under pressure, he defaulted to doing even when building would serve better. His identity was fused to the belief that he was valuable because he could solve problems.
Now consider Sarah, who leads a mission-driven organization serving individuals with disabilities. When she stepped into her role, the organization faced a strategic crossroads. Public funding was becoming unpredictable. Philanthropy was flattening. The mission was urgent but the model was fragile.
Rather than push harder, Sarah made a tougher call. She saw that what the organization needed wasn’t more effort; it was strategic clarity. She shifted the organization’s focus to privately funded life transitions and worked with her leadership team to redesign the ecosystem around it. They deepened client relationships, partnered with employers on long-term outcomes, equipped staff with clear priorities, and attracted donors aligned with the new approach. Direction became a shared system, not a personal agenda. The organization reduced its reliance on third-party funding, gaining control over what mattered most.
Unlike David, Sarah didn’t just shift her mindset. She built a system her team could use to make sound strategic choices without her. That change freed her from this default behavior and unlocked new levels of performance from her team.
How to Share the Strategy Responsibility
When I started working with Sarah, she was still making every strategic decision—not because she wanted to, but because there wasn’t a system for her team to do it well without her. Strategy lived in her head, not in shared practices. Here’s how I helped her change that.
Step 1: Build a monthly customer intelligence briefing.
In my experience—and backed by research done by Clayton Christensen and others—most leaders rely too much on instinct and one-off anecdotes when making strategic decisions. When market intelligence sits with just one person or team, two things happen: Functions interpret what they see through their own lens, and one leader bears the burden of connecting the dots. Spreading insight across senior leaders reduces bias, builds alignment, and creates shared ownership of the path forward.
To counter this, I asked each executive to call one or two customers each month, not to sell, but to learn. They asked what customers were trying to accomplish, where they were struggling, and why they chose us. Each department contributed one insight, which we compiled into a 30-minute cross-functional briefing and reviewed during the monthly leadership meeting. This shifted strategy from instinct to shared, actionable insight. The team saw which clients were happiest and least reliant on third-party funding. That clarity became the first step toward knowing what to say no to.
Ask yourself: What competitive, customer, or industry insight is overly confined to you (or a few others) that, if shared, could reshape how your team thinks about strategic options and trade-offs?
Step 2: Use a strategic decision matrix.
Next, I introduced a framework to help the team prioritize strategic initiatives in a consistent way. We started by mapping out all the criteria that mattered for strategic decisions: customer fit, capability leverage, resource efficiency, competitive differentiation, and others. We distilled these criteria down to three essential questions: Does this serve our primary customers better? Can we execute it excellently? Does it move us toward financial independence?
Each opportunity gets scored against these criteria on a simple scale. Initiatives that don’t meet the minimum threshold get paused or reworked. Those that clear it move forward. This gave the team a shared lens for evaluating ideas without requiring Sarah to weigh in every time.
Here’s what the matrix looked like for Sarah’s team:
- Strategic criteria:
- Does this serve our primary customers better?
- Does this strengthen our competitive differentiators?
- Can we execute this excellently?
- Does this move us toward financial independence?
- Scoring scale: 1–5
- Decision threshold: 4
- Decision matrix:
- Opportunity being evaluated:
- Decision-maker(s):
- Total weighted score:
- Proceed or decline?
Ask yourself: Do we have a clear, shared way to compare initiatives, or are we relying on persuasive champions and political capital to shape our strategy?
Step 3: Build a learning rhythm.
Strategic insight doesn’t just come from analysis, but from conversation, curiosity, and continuous exploration. I helped Sarah’s team introduce a broader form of team-led learning into their monthly leadership meetings. One key component was running after action reviews (AARs), led by the people who made the decisions. They asked: What did we expect? What happened? Why? What will we do differently next time? Sarah often stepped back from these sessions, attending only when her presence truly added value so that the team could engage in open, reflective thinking.
But we didn’t stop there. We rotated the responsibility for bringing in new learning each month across the executive team. Sometimes it was a shift in customer behavior they were noticing from Step 1. Sometimes it was a new framework, book, or industry trend that might shape future thinking. These short, peer-led briefings sparked curiosity, challenged assumptions, and surfaced new possibilities.
Over time, learning became less episodic and more embedded in the culture. The team wasn’t just reviewing past actions—they were actively evolving their thinking.
When leaders build this kind of peer-driven learning rhythm, they shift the team’s identity from executors to sense-makers. Insight flows faster. Assumptions get tested in real time. And instead of relying on top-down answers, the organization begins to surface emergent intelligence: patterns, signals, and shared understanding that no one person could generate alone. The result is a team that becomes more adaptive by default.
Ask yourself: Are your team’s learning moments confined to retrospectives, or are they also making time to explore what might be true next?
Step 4: Track decision independence.
Finally, I gave Sarah’s team a way to track and learn from their decisions over time. They created a simple strategic decision journal to log major initiatives. For each one, they recorded the framing question, key assumptions, evaluation criteria, outcome, and what they learned.
In monthly leadership meetings, in addition to their core customer debrief, the team would review major decisions made since the last session, looking at what worked, what didn’t, and what should be adjusted going forward. This created a regular rhythm of reflection that sharpened strategic thinking.
They also began reviewing the last five major decisions during onboarding for new leaders. This gave incoming team members a clear window into how the company’s leaders think and how that thinking is evolving.
When leaders begin to track decisions, they build a feedback loop into their thinking. Patterns emerge, assumptions surface, and accountability shifts from defending the past to improving the future. Over time, this discipline not only sharpens decision quality and velocity; it becomes a powerful tool for onboarding, alignment, and strategic learning.
Ask yourself: If a new leader joined tomorrow, could they quickly understand how and why our team makes decisions, or would they be starting from scratch?
Outcome
Sarah didn’t just delegate strategy; she built the systems for her team to own it. The proof came when two major opportunities arrived in the same month.
When a workforce development agency proposed a “World of Work” job skills training lab, Sarah’s team scored it highly: It served their core customers, leveraged existing capabilities, and reduced grant dependency. The team gave it a score of 4.7 out of 5—and they were able to move forward without consulting Sarah.
And when a developer offered land and funding for onsite housing units, the team scored it highly on mission alignment but poorly on resource efficiency and customer focus. They gave it a score of 3.9 out of 5, which was below the minimum threshold they had set. The team declined the proposal and focused resources on job training instead.
Both decisions were presented to Sarah as updates, not requests for approval. When I asked her what had changed most, Sarah said: “The decision-making framework has broken a frustrating cycle of unresolved debates and stalled progress. Now, discussions are focused, decisions stick, and momentum is real.”
Decentralization isn’t just theory. BCG reports that in environments where uncertainty prevails, companies that rework their operating model and culture can improve the quality of decisions made locally by 20 to 30%.
Rethinking Leadership Value
Your job as a leader isn’t to be the smartest person in the room; it’s to make the room smarter than any one person. Instead of shifting from doing to delegating, you’re shifting from directing to designing systems. That’s how you move from default to design, from bottleneck to builder.
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