Why your managers keep escalating decisions they should be making

Managers who bring you everything aren’t usually incapable of deciding. They’ve learned, often correctly, that deciding without you carries more risk than asking.

It’s a rational response to an irrational incentive

If a manager makes a call and you’d have made a different one, they hear about it. If they ask first, they don’t. Given that choice, most reasonable people ask first — every time, forever, regardless of how capable they actually are.

That means the fix isn’t a training course on “decision-making skills.” It’s changing what happens when they decide without you.

What actually needs to change

• Make the boundary explicit. Vague authority (“use your judgement”) isn’t authority. Specific authority (“you can approve refunds under £500 without checking”) is.
• Protect the first few decisions. The first time a manager makes a call under new authority, resist the urge to relitigate it even if you’d have done it slightly differently. You’re not grading the decision — you’re training the behaviour.
• Make asking-first the exception, not the default. If someone checks in on something clearly within their remit, ask them what they’d have decided, then say “do that” — rather than deciding it for them.

The real test

You’ll know it’s working when a manager makes a decision, it goes fine, and you only hear about it afterwards, in passing. That’s not a manager going rogue. That’s a manager doing their job.

Demo content, written for this proof of concept in the Oblong editorial voice.