How to Set Decision Rights in Your Business
By Brendan Levin. 20+ years scaling businesses, from teams of 8 to 600 and budgets from startup to $100m.
Key takeaways
- A decision right without a threshold is just a title. The number is what makes delegation real.
- Cover four categories: spend, hiring, client commitments, and operational changes.
- "Act and tell" beats "ask then act". The default should be autonomy, not approval.
- A decision-rights map only holds if Direction is already clear. Ambiguous goals guarantee escalation.
Why decisions keep routing back to you
Most founders who are buried in decisions think they have a delegation problem. Usually they have a structure problem. Nobody on the team knows exactly where their authority ends, so when a call feels significant they do the safe thing: they ask you. The escalation is rational. You just never told them they did not need to.
The pattern accelerates as the team grows. More people means more calls happening, and without a decision-rights map each person draws their own invisible line in a different place. One person approves a $5,000 spend without blinking. Another asks you about a $300 software subscription. You answer both, and the behaviour reinforces itself.
This is owner dependency operating through a specific mechanism. Owner dependency is the broader problem. The decision-rights gap is one of its sharpest edges. Fix the map and you cut off a large fraction of the upstream noise.
The four categories every decision-rights map must cover
A usable map covers the decisions that actually recur in your business. Four categories capture most of them. Start here, add categories that are specific to your context later.
Spend is usually the fastest to define and the most immediately freeing. Hiring affects the team and carries real cost, so it warrants a tighter line. Client commitments bind the business contractually and reputationally. Operational changes, things like a new process, a new tool, or a supplier swap, shape how work gets done and tend to fly under the radar until something breaks.
- Spend: What can each person or role authorise without approval, and at what number does it escalate?
- Hiring: Who can extend an offer, and does it require sign-off above a certain salary band?
- Client commitments: Who can agree to a scope change, a deadline shift, or a contract term?
- Operational changes: Who can implement a new tool, swap a supplier, or change a standing process?
How to write a threshold that actually works
A threshold has three parts: a named person or role, a defined boundary (a dollar amount, a risk category, or a scope size), and a clear instruction on what to do on each side of that line. The instruction on the lower side should almost always be "act and tell", not "ask then act".
Here is a worked example for spend. Any spend under $2,000 that falls inside an approved budget line: the owning person acts and tells you after. Any spend between $2,000 and $10,000, or any spend outside an approved budget line regardless of amount: the owning person sends a short note with the number, the reason, and their recommendation, and you respond within 24 hours. Any spend above $10,000: you decide together before it moves. The numbers are illustrative. Your real thresholds depend on your revenue, your margins, and your risk tolerance. The structure is the point.
Write the threshold before you hand over the responsibility. If you wait until a decision arrives to figure out whose call it is, you are already back in the loop. Delegation that comes back broken almost always traces back to a missing threshold, not a capability gap in the person you delegated to.
The decision-rights map: a working template
Build a simple table. One row per decision category. Columns for the decision type, who owns it, the threshold below which they act without you, the threshold above which they involve you, and the expected protocol on each side. Keep it to one page. If it takes longer than ten minutes to find the answer for a given situation, the map is too complicated to use.
| Decision category | Owner | Act alone (no approval) | Involve founder | Protocol |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spend | Functional lead | Under $2,000, within budget | Above $10,000 or outside budget | Act and tell / note with recommendation / decide together |
| Hiring | Hiring manager | Extend offer within approved band | Offer above band or net-new role | Present shortlist, founder joins final round above threshold |
| Client commitments | Account lead | Scope or deadline shifts under 5% of contract value | Any term change or >5% shift | Flag before committing, founder reviews contract changes |
| Operational changes | Team lead | New tool under spend threshold, process within their function | Supplier swap or cross-function process change | Announce in weekly review / escalate before implementing |
The self-test: will this map hold without you in the room?
Take one full week away with no contact. Do not answer messages. Do not check in. Watch what stalls. What stalls is what still runs on you, which means either the threshold is set wrong, the person does not know the threshold exists, or the underlying Direction is too vague for anyone to make a confident call without checking.
That last one matters. A decision-rights map depends on a clear Direction to function. If the team does not know what the business is optimising for this year, they cannot weigh a spend call or a client commitment without involving you. Setting Direction for your team is the prerequisite step. Get that right first, then the map holds on its own.
If calls still escalate after the map is written and the thresholds are communicated, do not immediately assume the person is incapable. Run the call post-mortem first. Was the threshold unclear? Did the situation fall into a gap the map did not cover? Was the Direction ambiguous enough that the person could not make the call confidently? Fix the structure before you question the person. Scaling past the founder requires this discipline.
What a decision-rights map does not fix on its own
A decision-rights map is one of three structural pieces. The other two are Direction (the single outcome the team is organised around this year, defined in one sentence with the numbers that prove it moved) and Delivery (the standing weekly operating rhythm that moves work through the team without the founder pushing). All three are part of a founder operating system.
If you install a clean decision-rights map but the team still has no clear Direction, the map will develop holes because people cannot make confident calls in ambiguous situations. If you install both but there is no Delivery rhythm, decisions will get made correctly but work will still stall because nothing is surfacing what is stuck. The map is load-bearing, but it does not stand alone.
If you want to see clearly which decisions are still routing to you and why, the free Operating Diagnostic maps exactly that.
Take the free diagnosticCommon questions
How do I set decision thresholds without setting them too high or too low?
Start with your own behaviour as the baseline. Look at the last 30 decisions you were pulled into. For each one, ask honestly whether it needed you or whether a capable person with clear authority could have handled it. The ones that did not need you reveal where your threshold is currently too low. Set the new threshold just above those calls, not so high that real risk lands without your visibility, not so low that you are still in every grey-area conversation.
What is the difference between a decision right and a delegation?
Delegation is handing a task to someone. A decision right is assigning the authority to make a category of call permanently, including the authority to be wrong within the defined boundary. Delegation tends to be one-time and project-specific. A decision right is structural and standing. Most founders delegate tasks constantly and assign decision rights almost never, which is why the escalations keep coming.
Should every employee have a defined decision right, or just senior people?
Every role that makes recurring calls affecting spend, clients, or team members should have a defined threshold. That is usually your functional leads and managers. Individual contributors generally operate within the decision rights their manager holds. The map does not need to go to every person on the team, but it must go deep enough that no senior manager is routinely bouncing calls to you that sit within their level of responsibility.
My team always asks me even when they technically have the authority. What is going wrong?
Two common causes. First, the threshold was never explicitly communicated. Having a decision-rights map in a document nobody has seen is the same as not having one. Walk each person through their own thresholds directly, not in a group meeting where people nod and forget. Second, check whether you have trained the escalation by responding fast and thoroughly to every question. If asking you is easy and low-cost, people will keep doing it. Make acting-and-telling the path of least resistance, not asking.
Do I need a consultant or an operating advisor to build a decision-rights map?
You can build the map yourself using the template on this page. The harder challenge is usually seeing where the structural gaps are across all three pillars, Direction, Decisions, and Delivery, and knowing whether the thresholds you set are calibrated to your actual business risk rather than your comfort level. That is where an outside view is useful. The free Operating Diagnostic is a low-commitment starting point that maps where your week actually goes and surfaces what still runs on you.
How often should I update the decision-rights map?
Review it when the business changes materially: a new functional lead joins, revenue doubles, you add a significant new service line, or you notice a pattern of escalations in a category the map does not cover well. It is not a quarterly ritual. It is a living document you update when the structure it describes no longer matches the business you are running.