🖤 Open Works #027 When Leadership’s Decision-Making Is the Problem—What Can You Do?

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 440+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🚥 Edition 19: Building a culture integration roadmap for your next merger – a tangible diagnostic, guided tour and framework to support you.

🎉 Edition 20: Everything we built in 2024 – our top open source resources for people leaders, downloaded 800k+.

🎯 Edition 16: Building my people strategy from scratch! SOS – a principle driven framework to building your startup’s people strategy.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

⚡ The Problem

When leadership decisions feel like they’re made in a black box, trust erodes. The team feels disempowered, managers feel bypassed, and people impacted by the decisions are left confused (or worse, frustrated).

Here’s what we’ve seen happen in companies where decision-making isn't clear:

🚨 People spend more time decoding why something happened than executing on it.
🚨 The team gets stuck in “learned helplessness”—assuming decisions will happen to them, not with them.
🚨 Founders and leaders get overwhelmed by decision fatigue because they have to make every call.

The result? Slow execution, disengaged teams, and a lot of whispered “WTF just happened?” Slack DMs.

Not good.

Good decision-making is transparent, intentional, and inclusive where it makes sense—but it doesn’t mean every decision needs to be a democracy.

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve

🏃 TL;DR:

• Step 1: Map the current state of decision-making.

• Step 2: Surface the impact (positive and negative) of how decisions are made today.

• Step 3: Align on what good decision-making should look like.

• Step 4: Define a clear, agreed-upon decision-making framework.

• Step 5: Communicate back to the broader team what’s changing, and what they can expect moving forwards.

💡 How to Facilitate a ‘How We Make Decisions’ Session

🎯 Part 1: Map the Current State

Kick off with a sticky note exercise where leadership maps out how decisions are made today.

👀 Prompts to guide discussion:

• How do we currently make [big] decisions?

• Who is involved (or not involved) in the process?

• How do we communicate decisions once they’re made?

• What types of decisions do we currently make without consulting others?

🏆 Goal: Visualise the problem. Get leadership to see—on paper—the patterns and gaps in how they currently operate.

🎯 Part 2: Surface the Impact

💥 This part makes decision-making real by unpacking its impact.

Use specific instances and run a mini 5min retro on each.

🎬 Facilitation Hack:
Channel Friends episode titles:
"Ok, let’s zoom in on ‘The One Where We Moved Someone Without Telling Anyone.’”

🔍 Mini Retro Questions:

• How did this decision feel for those impacted?

• What did we waste (time, trust, energy) as a result of doing it this way?

• How did this decision-making approach impact our business goals?

• What could we have done better?

🏆 Goal: Get leadership to see the unintended consequences of current state decision-making.

🎯 Part 3: Align on a Better Way Forward

Now that leadership has felt and acknowledged the pain and waste of current state decision-making, it’s time to agree on a better way forward.

📝 Facilitate a ‘Start / Stop / Continue’ exercise:

• What are we going to start doing when it comes to making decisions?

• What are we going to stop doing?

• What are we going to continue doing that’s working?

🛠 Optional: Define a Decision-Making Framework
For teams ready to take it further, introduce a simple decision-making framework like RAPID (Recommender, Approver, Performer, Input-giver, Decider) or DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributor, Informed).

💡 FYI: In 100+ companies I've never seen RAPID/DACI or equivalent work well as a day to day point of reference. However, I have seen enormous value in just having the conversation that goes into populating one.  

🏆 Goal: Create an agreed-upon approach to decision-making that balances speed, inclusivity, and transparency.

🎯 Part 4: Share Back with the Org (If You’re Feeling Brave. P.S Be Brave :) 🚀)

The most impactful leadership teams don’t just change things internally—they tell the org what they are changing and why they’re changing it.

💬 Example Slack / Email Post-Session:

"Hey team—at our recent offsite, we reflected on how we make and communicate decisions. We realised there have been times where we’ve made calls that impacted people without enough context-sharing, and we want to do better. Moving forward, you can expect: [3 bullet points of agreed changes]."

This step takes real leadership courage—but done well, it builds massive trust and credibility.

🧠 Takeaways & Next Steps

1️⃣ Map your leadership team’s current decision-making approach.
2️⃣ Unpack real examples to surface the impact.
3️⃣ Align on a clear, consistent way forward.
4️⃣ Optional: Share back with the broader team.

📚️ Good resources relating to this problem…

Principles of Decision Making [LEVELS HEALTH] 

Decision-making framework [JURO]

🤓 Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next week anonymously!

🖤 John & Adam

🖤 Psst! Are You Part Of The Open Org Community Yet?

Well goodness my friend, you should be! 😉 

Join 440+ startup and scale-up People & Talent leaders in Slack, and get exclusive access to twice-monthly live events (roundtables and guest firesides), quarterly hackathons, and direct support from Adam and me.

With 🧊 & 🔥 

John & Adam

👉️ Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Forward it their way so they don’t miss out, and make my day whilst you’re at it! 🙂