What Companies Get Wrong About Decision Rights

Clear decision rights are crucial for collaboration: They prevent confusion, speed up execution, and reduce conflict, especially in matrixed, cross-functional, and project-driven organizations. Tools such as RACI, RAPID, and DARE are meant to help organizations define them. Unfortunately, these tools often produce only a document detailing who will play what role in a decision. And as one manager at a global e-commerce company told one of the authors in a workshop: “Decision rights are like the position plan for a children’s soccer game—a nice plan on paper that no one understands or remembers.”

One problem is that when leaders use decision tools, they often encounter resistance and skepticism. In many years of studying how power dynamics shape interactions and decisions, and in their work advising and educating more than 100 global companies in a wide variety of industries, the authors identified four common errors that organizations make when establishing decision rights.

1. Confirming Roles Without Clarifying Goals.  When teams attempt to assign roles before goals have been carefully defined, discussions about decision rights often degenerate into ego-driven turf wars. Sometimes objectives are far too broad and not broken down into concrete steps or subgoals. That makes it impossible to allocate ownership of specific decisions and identify where collaboration is needed. Other objectives, in contrast, can be too narrow or insignificant. Particularly when goals are too broad, conflicts arise among executives over the rights for decisions about them.  Before team members focus on role assignments, they all should be able to articulate the specific, measurable, and time-bound goals and subgoals.
2. Assuming Everyone Will Adhere to the Boss’s Spreadsheet.  A common and costly mistake  is treating decision rights as a static list created by a single senior leader, captured in a spreadsheet. The assumption is that once roles are assigned and documented, people will play them. But in practice, they rarely do.  High-performing teams understand that RACI and tools like it are not ends in themselves; they’re conversation starters. They prompt team members to clarify goals, confirm responsibilities, support one another in their positions, and hold one another accountable.  The obvious solution is to cocreate RACIs rather than dictate them. Bring the people who will live with the decision into the room to debate roles and resolve tensions.
3. Misunderstanding Roles.  Teams often have differing views of the behaviors expected for each role.  The fix is straightforward: Build a simple, behavioral description of each role and institutionalize it. When people know what being accountable looks like in action (how that person gathers input, facilitates debate, makes a call, and explains it), the tool stops being theoretical. The same holds true for the other roles.
4. Getting Stuck in the Same Roles.  A final mistake occurs when people get trapped in certain roles despite the best of intentions. In some cases, senior leaders are always accountable, and the people in the layer below are always responsible. In others, people act as if they’re accountable when they’re not—something that often happens when a teammate at a lower level is accountable on paper but that person’s boss still acts like the one in charge.  The best teams are intentional about tailoring roles to the topic at hand. They don’t get mired in ingrained patterns of power or deference to the formal org chart.

To organize their teams to make sound decisions, leaders cannot just articulate roles in spreadsheets. They must establish a robust process that’s woven into work—and ensures not only that people stick to their designated roles but also that the roles themselves are continually revisited as goals evolve or friction arises. Leaders and their teams should routinely ask: Did we play our positions? Where did our assigned roles support or constrain us? Such an approach will turn decision rights from static artifacts into living systems.