Title: Who Really Makes the Big Decisions in Your Company?
Headings: Who Really Makes the Big Decisions in Your Company?
Decision making
Who Really Makes the Big Decisions in Your Company?
The Unnamed Decision Makers
Acknowledge that the nameless decision-making teams exist, and ask how you can make more deliberate use of them.
Why Senior Teams Don’t Make the Big Decisions
The Virtues of the Kitchen Cabinet
Building a Better Kitchen Cabinet
The kitchen cabinet frees the CEO from the tyranny of the org chart.
Small groups are much better than large groups at considering critical decisions.
The kitchen cabinet’s small size and its composition foster candor and discretion.
Cabinet membership isn’t fixed, so CEOs can get precisely the counsel they need when they need it.
The group has no name, so people can’t easily lobby to be included.
A Better Use of the Top Team’s Time
Establish a common worldview as the basis for decision making.
Broadly prioritize initiatives.
Allocate resources and manage dependencies.
Attitude Adjustment for the Senior Management Team
Having regular dialogue about the senior team’s worldview is one hallmark of a strategically well-managed business.

Content: So what looks like a group decision is often merely ritualistic approval. It’s the rare business case, for instance, that is turned down at the final presentation. As one CEO I interviewed put it, “Only an idiot would bring a business case for final approval in front of an executive committee without having every single person in that room wired ahead of time.” More subtle are the situations when a boss brings a decision to the team for consensus and remains at the table for the discussion. Because the group may reach a different conclusion than the boss might have arrived at on his own, both he and the group are likely to believe that he genuinely delegated the decision making. But because the boss participates in a discussion whose final outcome is within a range of possibilities that he finds acceptable, he never actually relinquishes his decision-making authority. Therefore, it’s something of an illusion that the executive committee makes many of the top decisions. But it could hardly be otherwise, for some fairly straightforward reasons. First, organizational accountability for making important decisions virtually always rests with individuals, not teams. I can’t think of a single case when an executive has been put in charge of a division or function and her boss has said, “Jill, I want you and your team to make good decisions together to run the business well.