Make Better, Faster Business Decisions

In every organization, teams are making hundreds of decisions daily. But how many are actually driving meaningful and timely progress?

For many leaders, the answer, frustratingly, is “too few”.

Research from McKinsey revealed that only 20% of managers and executives would honestly say that their organizations excel at decision-making. The problem doesn’t stem from people not caring. Instead, it’s because staff across all levels and/or departments feel paralyzed by unclear authority, conflicting priorities, and fear of making the wrong call.

Creating an organization where everyone can make rapid, effective decisions at all levels is a multifaced challenge. Success requires alignment across four critical spheres: strategy, operations, team dynamics, and execution.

Read on to access our holistic blueprint on how leaders can drive innovation and resilience by building an organizational culture where decision-making is strategic, agile, and mission- and values-aligned at all levels.

Explore how to create clear strategic guardrails that empower autonomous action, develop authentic leadership that models values-based decision-making, build teams with the skills and psychological safety to act decisively, and implement hiring practices that reinforce a culture of accountability.

Let’s start by quickly assessing where your organization stands today.

Self-assessment: How decision-ready is your organization?

Before implementing any transformation framework, it’s essential to understand your current state. Use the following 4 question self-assessment to pinpoint exactly where your organization stands in building its decision-making capability.

1. Does your strategic plan enable effective decision-making? 

   Are your values, mission, vision, and strategic priorities clear enough to guide action without constant clarification? 


2. Are your leaders demonstrating values-driven decision making in practice? 

   Do leaders visibly use organizational mission/purpose/values when making decisions? Do they collaborate and communicate with their teams throughout the decision-making process? 


3. Are you hiring organizationally aligned people and equipping them for success? 

   Beyond cultural fit, does your hiring process assess for values alignment and decision-making capability? Once hired, do employees have clear and well-defined roles, measurable success metrics, and practical tools (e.g., Terms of Reference, decision frameworks) that go beyond high-level strategy documents? 


4. Is there psychological safety for decision-making? 

   Do employees feel safe to make potentially “wrong” decisions without fear of punishment?

If you answered “yes” to most of these questions (or are working on getting to “yes”), then making better, faster decisions will likely soon be part of your organization’s DNA. If several questions prompted “no” or “sometimes,” you’ve identified critical gaps that may be slowing your organization down and creating unnecessary friction.

When there are clear guardrails and a good level of flexibility within them (industry-allowing), staff can make effective and timely autonomous decisions. This approach avoids wasted time and effort on unnecessary approvals. As a result, your workforce is empowered to act with confidence, teams operate more effectively, and employees experience genuine satisfaction and dignity in their work.

Having a balance between structure and freedom is what enables rapid, confident decision-making across all levels of the organization. Let’s dive deeper into each question and explore practical ways you can improve in each area.

Strategic plan clarity: from abstract values to actionable guidance

Oftentimes, organizations mistake inspiring mission statements for actionable strategy. While “integrity” and “innovation” sound admirable, they provide little guidance when teams face real trade-offs.

A strategic plan that truly accelerates decision-making must function less like a rigid roadmap and more like a set of guardrails – simple, clear, memorable, and directly tied to the everyday choices employees face.

Here are four strategies to create (or retrofit) a strategic plan to provide actionable guidance and not just abstract values.

1. Transform abstract values into decision-making tools

Traditional value statements like “transparency” or “openness” may sound admirable, but they’re often too abstract to resolve real-world decisions employees encounter daily. The solution? Craft values around common choices your people actually face.

Consider how the company Yogi Tea’s words one of their values: “We will continuously improve.” This immediately signals that when facing a decision, employees should prioritize learning, staff empowerment, training, or psychological safety. It’s actionable guidance, not just an aspiration.

If you’re retrofitting your existing values, try the “dilemma test”. Imagine a common tension in your organization – perhaps choosing between meeting a tight deadline or ensuring quality standards. Would your current values clearly point toward one option? If not, begin shifting your value statements from abstract to actionable.

2. Define strategic priorities as decision parameters

Instead of creating a prescriptive task list that micromanages every move, define strategic goals that build confidence in decision-making.

Assess each strategic goal through a lens of:

• Are the conditions right to achieve this goal?
• How will success be measured?
• Is it clear what success looks like?

This approach transforms strategy from aspiration into daily decision filters. When a goal can’t be measured or achieved under existing conditions, it gets deprioritized without further debate. Your strategic priorities become practical parameters that guide decisions at every level.

3. Articulate mission as descriptive, not prescriptive

Even the most powerful mission statement has limits, particularly when organizational culture meets unique ethical or legal dilemmas. Smart organizations acknowledge this reality explicitly.

Rather than relying solely on individual interpretations or assumptions, name exceptions directly. This reduces paralysis and empowers judgment calls at every level. Your mission should describe your organization’s purpose while leaving room for contextual decision-making.

4. Create feedback loops that reinforce good decisions

Even the best-designed plan falters without visibility into its impact. Systematically test whether your strategic plan actually enables easier and more effective decision-making.

Assess both outcomes and decision quality – including factors like the number of options considered and time to finalize choices. Celebrate not just end results but instances where employees applied values and priorities to reach swift, well calibrated choices. Over time, this builds muscle memory for autonomous decision making.

By translating high-level strategy into action-oriented values, decision-filter priorities, and explicit boundary conditions, leaders can create a strategic plan that clarifies not just “what” but, critically “how” and “when” to decide. This alignment of culture, guardrails, and feedback mechanisms transforms strategy from a dusty document into a catalyst for fast, effective decision-making at every level.

Leadership alignment

As a leader, are you truly modeling values-driven decision-making? Do they know their own purpose and values? Do these align with those of the organization? And do they actually use these values when making decisions and communicate them when collaborating with their teams?

If you didn’t answer “yes” to all of the above, here are four steps to get you there:

1. Cultivate self‑awareness  throughout the organization

Effective leaders first need an accurate understanding of themselves – their thoughts, emotions, biases – and how these influence others. Research shows that truly self‑aware people make sounder decisions, build stronger relationships, and lead more profitably. As self‑awareness grows, leaders become more adept at identifying and working with their core purpose and values, laying the groundwork for authenticity.

Our CEO 360 evaluations provides comprehensive feedback from key stakeholders, offering invaluable insights into leadership effectiveness and decision-making patterns. This structured approach helps executives understand their impact and identify areas for growth. For example, one CEO discovered that their habit of revisiting “final” decisions had trained their team to delay implementation, knowing changes were likely coming.

2. Develop and articulate authentic leadership

Authentic leaders draw directly from their personal lives and experiences, knowing how these connect with their work and organizational purpose, allowing these to ground their decisions. Bill George’s framework encourages leaders to craft personal purpose narratives that link individual motivations to organizational aims, fostering alignment at the top.

By sharing these stories publicly, be it through town halls, team meetings, or internal blogs, leaders can demonstrate consistency between personal values and organizational direction, making it clear that their decisions emanate from a coherent value system. Many organizations invest in structured leadership development programs that help executives articulate and live these connections authentically.

3. Model values‑aligned behaviours

Culture statements must translate into visible actions. For example, if an organization states that they value “responsible sourcing,” executives must visibly prioritize sourcing responsibly, even when it’s the difficult choice to make.

Values-driven leadership is sometimes confused with harmony, when in actual fact it may require decisive action or confrontation. This suggests a growth edge: values-based leadership must integrate clarity, boundaries, and courage. Visible enforcement of cultural guardrails signals to employees that values aren’t optional adornments but binding decision filters at every level.

4. Embed collaborative decision protocols

To ensure decisions reflect shared purpose and values, organizations should adopt structured collaboration practices. This could include processes where decision‑owners must solicit input from diverse stakeholders before acting, or a communication plan that involves the broadcasting of both the reasoning and outcomes of key choices. By publicly mapping each decision back to articulated values and strategic priorities, leaders reinforce a culture of transparency and collective buy‑in.

When leaders possess robust self‑awareness, craft authentic purpose stories, model values‑based behaviors, and institutionalize collaborative decision practices, the answers to the four critical questions become a lived reality rather than an aspirational ideal. This holistic approach ensures an organizational culture grounded in trust, where every decision at every level is grounded in a shared sense of purpose, guided by clear values, and communicated openly – fueling speed, alignment, and sustainable performance.

Building decision-making into hiring and retention practices

Your organization’s decision-making speed and effectiveness depends on having the right people in the right place as well as equipped with the right tools. Too often, talented hires struggle because they lack clear authority or practical resources.

For clarification, hiring for values alignment doesn’t mean seeking identical thinking. Rather, it’s finding people who share complementary values while bringing diverse perspectives to the table. This combination will strengthen your organization’s resilience and capabilities. Conversely, hiring someone with clearly opposing values is a recipe for cultural erosion.

Here are our top field-tested tips on how to hire the right people and set them up for success:

1. Make values alignment tangible in interviews

Move beyond generic culture-fit questions. Probe specifically for values alignment and decision-making approach. Ask candidates to share real examples: “Tell me about a time you used [specific organizational value] to guide a difficult choice.” Or test decision-making directly: “Walk me through a challenging decision you made. What factors did you consider? Who did you involve? How did you move forward despite uncertainty?”

Use structured behavioral questions tied directly to your values to surface evidence of mindset and likely future actions. When your hiring panel explicitly justifies offers or rejections based on values alignment, you accomplish two things: 1) signal to candidates what truly matters in your organization; and 2) ensure new hires already embody the behaviors that enable rapid, autonomous decision-making.

2. Clearly define and communicate expectations, roles, and responsibilities

 Ambiguity around who has the final say over what is one of the biggest blocks to organizational productivity. Use frameworks like RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) or DARE (Decider, Advisor, Recommender, Executor) to clarify exactly who owns each decision type. Capture roles in living documents such as team charters or Terms of Reference (ToR) that spell out decision scope, escalation paths, and approval thresholds.

Remember to regularly review and update these documents. As priorities shift and teams evolve, decision authority should evolve too. What made sense a year ago might be creating bottlenecks today.

3. Provide reference tools beyond the strategic plan

Your strategic plan tells people “why” decisions matter, but employees need operational tools that show them “how” to make those decisions effectively.

To empower action, create and maintain practical resources such as ToRs for key roles and projects, decision‑brief templates, risk assessment guidelines and governance checklists to help translate strategy into action.

Make these tools readily accessible in a central repository, and train teams on their use. For example, a one‑page decision brief template can guide employees to document context, criteria, options, and risks before seeking approval. This fosters consistency throughout the organization and will greatly reduce the back‑and‑forth that most decisions get bogged down in.

By recruiting for cultural contribution, anchoring hiring to action-driving values, communicating strategic guardrails, clarifying decision roles through ToRs, and equipping teams with practical reference tools, organizations create the conditions for hiring aligned people, setting them up for success, and enabling fast, effective decision‑making at every level.

Permission to make the wrong decision

If your people are afraid to make wrong decisions, they won’t make any decisions at all.

Psychological safety – the belief that one can speak up, admit mistakes, and take interpersonal risks without fear of punishment – is a critical enabler of learning, innovation, and effective decision making.

To foster an environment that genuinely fosters psychological safety and allows “wrong” decisions as part of growth, consider the following:

1. Turn mistakes into learning moments

 Bake regular lessons learned and retrospectives into the culture. When executives and managers openly share their missteps first, it normalizes the fact that everyone fails sometimes.

After setbacks, focus reviews on system improvements, not individual blame. Ask “What can we fix in our process?” instead of “Who messed up?” This simple shift transforms failures from career-limiting events into valuable data points.

2. Establish norms that encourage experimentation

Encourage framing suggestions with “Yes, and…” to validate contributions before critiquing them, fostering constructive dialogue. Organizations can also pilot new concepts by undertaking small scale experiments where teams can test ideas without a full blown rollout, creating a burgeoning sense that one is safe to fail. Publicly acknowledge decisions that embraced uncertainty or course corrected boldly, underscoring that intelligent risks, even “wrong” ones, are valued.

Organizations that create true psychological safety see dramatic improvements in:

• Decisions happening faster because people aren’t paralyzed by fear
• Innovation increasing as teams experiment more freely
• Accelerated learning when failures become teaching moments
• Top talent staying because they can grow without fear

By modeling vulnerability, rewarding smart risks, and building trust systematically, organizations can cultivate a culture where individuals feel secure to make the potentially ‘wrong’ choice and learn from it, fueling continuous improvement and innovation.

In today’s fast‑changing environment, organizations can transform decision-making from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage.

Next steps

By ensuring your strategic plan offers simple, memorable values and priorities, modeling purpose‑driven leadership, hiring and equipping people who embody those values, and cultivating genuine psychological safety, organizational leaders can establish clear decision-making guardrails and maximum autonomy. Teams can stop waiting for approval on routine decisions. Leaders can focus on just the right escalations. Employees can act with confidence and dignity.

The result is a culture where the ability to decide – at speed and with shared purpose – is a core capability, and one that can be sustained through inevitable and reliable change.

When organizations commit to this comprehensive approach – from board governance transformation to individual team development – they create lasting change that permeates every level. The journey requires dedication, but the result is an organization that moves with agility, purpose, and confidence through inevitable and reliable change.