Upward Delegation

A leader I once worked with had built a genuinely strong team. Smart people, good instincts, low attrition. And yet almost every decision of any size, small, medium or big, routed back through one person, not because that person insisted on it, but because the team kept bringing it to them. Budget call. Vendor pick. A tricky message to a client. A difficult conversation with someone underperforming. A call on which team owns a piece of work that sits between two functions. Even ordinary, business-as-usual decisions that shouldn't have needed a second opinion at all. Each one arrived with the same unspoken question underneath: is it okay if I do this?

I've seen this pattern enough times now to know it isn't really about confidence, and it isn't really about the team lacking capability either. It's something closer to a habit, formed somewhere earlier in a career, that never got updated for the room these people are in now.

Where the habit comes from

Many of us learned how to operate inside organisations that ran on clear hierarchy. Decisions moved up. Approval moved down. Asking before acting wasn't a weakness in that world, it was simply how things worked, and people who asked well were often seen as careful and reliable.

It's worth saying that this isn't only a legacy-corporate pattern. Smaller, leaner companies, the kind built on frugality and tight control of every rupee spent, often produce the same checking instinct from a completely different direction. There, the hierarchy isn't the issue, the founder simply is the final word on almost everything, because the stakes of getting it wrong feel personal and immediate in a way they don't in a larger, more cushioned organisation. The effect on the team looks identical to what plays out in an old-economy hierarchy: people learn to bring decisions upward rather than make them, even when nobody above them actually wants to be asked.

The trouble starts when someone carries that habit into a different kind of organisation, one that's flatter, faster and built to reward people who act and adjust rather than people who check first. That room usually looks like this: fewer layers between an idea and its execution, decisions expected within hours rather than weeks and a quiet premium placed on people who move without waiting for a sign-off. The skill that once made someone look careful now makes them look hesitant. Nobody sends a memo announcing that the rules changed. The person just starts noticing, slowly, that the room responds differently to people who decide than to people who ask.

Why it's easy to miss

From the outside, this looks like good behaviour. People who delegate decisions upward are rarely difficult to manage. They don't make mistakes that show up in a post-mortem, because they've quietly handed the risk of being wrong to someone else. That's exactly what makes the pattern so easy for an organisation to overlook: it doesn't generate complaints, escalations or visible friction. It just generates a slow, steady drag on how fast decisions move, distributed across dozens of small moments that never individually look like a problem.

The same is true at a personal level. Most people in this pattern don't experience it as a confidence issue. They experience it as conscientiousness. It takes someone else, a mentor, a manager, sometimes a coach, to notice that the question being asked usually already has an answer the person knows perfectly well. They're not actually unsure. They're checking.

What actually shifts it

The useful move I've seen isn't telling someone to 'be more confident' or 'just decide'. That advice rarely lands, because the person doesn't experience themselves as lacking confidence in the first place. What tends to work better is far narrower: noticing, out loud, with the actual evidence in front of them, that they already knew the answer before they asked. Once someone sees that pattern clearly in two or three real instances, something shifts. They stop experiencing the checking as carefulness and start experiencing it as a delay they're imposing on themselves.

Organisations can build this kind of noticing into the system rather than leaving it to chance, or to a one-off conversation with a mentor. A simple discipline, asking 'what would you have decided if I weren't in the room' before giving an answer, does more to surface this pattern than any training module. Some organisations go a step further and track it properly: a lightweight log of decisions that came up for approval, tagged by whether the approver actually changed anything or simply confirmed what was already proposed. Even a basic dashboard built on that one distinction, confirmed versus changed, makes the pattern visible at a team level in a way no individual conversation can. Used consistently, especially with high-potential people who default to checking, this turns a slow leak of decision-speed into a visible, fixable thing. The skill was usually always there. What was missing was a moment, and a measure, built into the routine that asked for it.

If you're reading this and recognising the shape of your own habit, the question worth sitting with isn't 'how do I become more confident'. It's narrower and more answerable: the last time you asked for permission, did you already know what you would have decided? If the honest answer is yes more often than not, the habit isn't protecting you from a bad decision. It's just slowing down a good one.

For an organisation, the fix isn't a single memo telling people to 'own their decisions', that rarely changes anything on its own. What actually moves this is a combination of clear guardrails and visible reward: defining in advance which decisions genuinely need a second opinion (legal exposure, irreversible spends, anything affecting another team's commitments) and explicitly naming everything else as theirs to decide, then noticing publicly when someone made a good call without checking rather than only noticing when a checked-first decision turns out well. A culture that quietly punishes the one bad independent call while ignoring the dozens of good ones will train people straight back into checking, no matter what the policy document says. None of this requires new software or a redesign of the org chart. It requires deciding, on purpose, what 'yours to decide' actually means, and then asking a sharper question of your own approvals each week: how many were genuine decisions, and how many were simply confirmations of something the person asking had already worked out? The gap between those two numbers is usually larger than most leaders expect, and closing it costs nothing more than asking differently.

Deepak Narayan is an independent leadership coach and consultant at Rivi Consulting.