What Companies Get Wrong About Decision Rights

At one global technology company, 12 executives recently crowded around a table to make the final decision on a heated issue: whether to add the C-suite role of chief innovation officer to their leadership team and expand the central unit that person would run. Their company, which made a variety of tools used in hospital settings, was confronting a changing environment that required it to ramp up its efforts to launch new and improved products. While the new role and the bigger unit would seemingly address that need, the discussion quickly devolved into a power struggle, with several participants arguing loudly and others quietly checking out. After 90 minutes of intense debate, the meeting ended without a decision.

The task force working on this proposal had created a clear process and set of rights for the decision: The CEO would make the final call while in the room with the four people who had critical input on it (the chief operating officer, the chief human resources officer, and the directors of the two biggest business units). Throughout, he would consult and inform others in the organization who could offer insights on the new position or would be affected by it. However, the way the decision was approached—with all 12 executive team members involved in the contentious final meeting—ignored those designated roles.

This is an example of a decision-rights failure.

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 us (Lindy) 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 our many years of studying how power dynamics shape interactions and decisions, and in our work advising and educating more than 100 global companies in a wide variety of industries, we’ve identified four common errors that organizations make when establishing decision rights. In this article we’ll explain why these mistakes persist. We’ll also describe how leaders can transform the output of decision-rights tools from static, neglected spreadsheets into a process promoting ongoing conversations that improve the quality of decisions, accelerate how quickly they’re made, and secure the buy-in of those affected.

How Decision-Rights Tools Are Meant to Work

At their core these tools offer simple rules for organizing collaboration around a specific decision. They’re used to assign people to the roles needed to make and execute it well. (See “Who Has the D: How Clear Decision Roles Enhance Organizational Performance,” HBR, January 2006.) RACI (with which teams identify who will be responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed) is the most common one. We’ll use it as the main example in this article, but our recommendations also apply to similar tools.

In RACI’s framework the accountable person makes the final decision and leads the decision team. We often advise organizations to use ARCI, not RACI, as it puts the role of the decision owner first and helps prevent confusion about the differences between the accountable and the responsible roles (which we’ll explain shortly). Only one person should be accountable for any given decision; having multiple people with that right invites power struggles and can cause delays. As we’ve noted, at the medical technology company that was considering a new head of innovation position (which we’ll call MedTech to preserve client confidentiality), the CEO was assigned to be accountable for the decision.

The people who are responsible provide unique and critical input, surface trade-offs, and engage in debate to help the person who is accountable make a good decision. Together with the accountable person, they constitute the decision team. Given that smaller teams are often most effective, only two to four people should be assigned to this role. At MedTech the executives in the responsible role for the decision about the new position—the COO, CHRO, and the directors of the two biggest business units—should have been the only ones in the room with the CEO for the final meeting about it.

Those in the consulted and informed roles are not part of the decision team but remain essential. People who are consulted provide expertise or perspective that the core team lacks, and people who are informed provide crucial support for successful implementation. Identifying these roles requires more than scanning an org chart; it entails understanding where influence actually resides. At MedTech the COO consulted the CFO on budget constraints and the chief legal officer on the legal red tape that this decision might involve, while proactively informing the HR leaders across the business units who would be affected by the new position and the expanding innovation unit.

So why does this seemingly straightforward process break down? It’s not because the tools are flawed but because they’re misunderstood, misused, or disconnected from real behavior. Let’s take a deeper look now at the four mistakes executives typically make—and how leaders can avoid them.

[ Mistake 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 (for instance, “Create a strategic plan for product line X”) and not broken down into concrete steps or subgoals (such as “complete a SWOT analysis” and “survey stakeholders to identify key strategic opportunities”). 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 (“Who’s making the slide template to use to present our strategic plan?”). Particularly when goals are too broad, conflicts arise among executives over the rights for decisions about them.

This was a problem at MedTech, where the CEO, CHRO, and business unit leads all thought they owned decisions regarding the company’s head count. Robust discussions we facilitated at the company revealed that several headcount-related decisions had not been disentangled, leading to oversize meetings and disagreements about who got to make final calls. After a formal debate the company’s executives landed on this: The CFO was accountable for approving the budget for the yearly head count. The CHRO was accountable for the proposal for the head-count size and for approving urgent, unplanned requests for jobs above a certain seniority level (except for C-suite hires, which would be approved by the CEO). And the leaders of each business unit were accountable for filling the roles in their preapproved head count and new positions below a certain pay grade.

Before team members focus on role assignments, they all should be able to articulate the specific, measurable, and time-bound goals and subgoals. In that discussion the best teams iterate between goals or subgoals and the roles. When they hit a snag, they go back, test, and refine their goals and subgoals before finalizing the RACI. This approach often reveals that the stakeholders competing to own decisions may actually want to own different subgoals, which can lead to win-win resolutions of many RACI conflicts.

[ Mistake 2 ] Assuming Everyone Will Adhere to the Boss’s Spreadsheet

A common and costly mistake—one that MedTech made—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.

One senior marketing leader at a multinational healthcare technology company learned that the hard way. In an attempt to resolve alignment problems between her central and regional teams, she unilaterally defined decision rights and handed a list of them to her direct reports, expecting them to comply. They didn’t. Because there was no shared buy-in, several didn’t play their specified roles, and collaboration faltered.

At a large global e-commerce company we advised, managers created spreadsheets with thousands of rows of decisions, each with its own unique RACI. The company’s teams looked at the file once and never again.

The problem in these cases was the absence of up-front discussions, when the rights were being determined, about who should have which role in which decision. When people help allocate roles, they’re far more likely to commit to them. 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. This is where power sharing becomes visible: Leaders model stepping back when they should be in a responsible or consulted role and stepping in when the team needs them to be accountable.

Be forewarned: These conversations aren’t easy. Initial team discussions of roles can feel difficult and unproductive. When challenges arise, such as when meetings to allocate decision rights deteriorate into clashes and infighting, you need to directly address the area of tension. RACI discussions often surface underlying communication problems or resentment that people have been reluctant to raise but that need to be resolved or aired to move forward.

To support such conversations, one client of ours, a global energy company, added an appendix to its corporate operating manual on how to handle common RACI conflicts within its matrix structure. It highlighted typical disagreements that might arise, offered practical talking points for navigating them, and laid out clear criteria for determining who should be accountable for a decision if confusion arose. Two good approaches we have seen companies take with such conflicts: resolving them by thinking through what would be in the best interest of the broader company, and identifying and assigning accountability to whoever is closest to the decision and has the most relevant perspective.

With practice, cocreated RACIs can create the buy-in needed for people to actually play their positions when the team takes the field.

[ Mistake 3 ] Misunderstanding Roles

Teams often have differing views of the behaviors expected for each role. Recently, at a session with a global consultancy that had used RACI for years, we polled 30 partners about which role had the final say in a decision. Half the partners said it was the accountable person, while the other half said it was the responsible person. One partner noted that in his local language “responsible” and “accountable” translate into the same word. Ironically, the tool the firm used to create clarity led to more confusion because of disagreement about what the RACI roles meant in practice.

Such confusion often causes decision roles to be set aside. Consider MedTech again. Though it had assigned decision rights for the creation of the head of innovation position, the final meeting revealed that its leaders didn’t understand what the RACI meant. For them, it implied simply that the accountable person (the CEO) and the three executives in the responsible role should be in the room when the decision was made. The 12 members of the executive team didn’t realize that no one but those four people should be there. They mistakenly assumed that there wouldn’t be buy-in unless the full team was present.

This error is common. Nearly every organization we’ve worked with has latent disagreement about what the roles in RACI actually mean. 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.

At MedTech we helped senior leaders draft a comprehensive guide that included clear definitions of the RACI roles and concrete examples of the desired behaviors for each one. (If you’d like to see what such a guide looks like, a set of role descriptions written by participants of workshops run by the University of Michigan’s Sanger Leadership Center, who hail from a range of industries and cultures, can be found on the center’s website in the “Collaboration Tools” section under the “Resources & Tools” tab.)

Though individual organizations’ definitions may vary somewhat, when RACI roles are played correctly, the accountable and the responsible people always gather input from the folks designated to be consulted and work to garner buy-in from those who should be informed. Then, when it’s time to hold a meeting to decide, the accountable person convenes with just the two to three people in the responsible roles. During that meeting it’s the accountable person’s job to ensure that the team shifts from command-and-control mode to “flat” mode (in which the leader levels the hierarchy and shares power) to brainstorm. (See “You Need Two Leadership Gears,” HBR, March–April 2023.) After kicking things off, the accountable person encourages the others to share their input (and the information and perspectives they all have gleaned from people in the consulted and informed roles) and debate options. At the meeting’s end the accountable person makes a final decision integrating the insights that emerged during the debate. Afterward, the accountable person explains the decision to the people in the consulted and informed roles.

[ Mistake 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.

This dynamic led one venture capital firm to pass up the opportunity to invest in a startup that later became a unicorn. One of us (Lindy) was brought in to do a postmortem on this miss. It turned out that the firm’s senior partner had dominated the discussions during the deal evaluation process and had de facto made the final decision (in other words, acted as if he were accountable). But his decision didn’t take into account the data the firm had gathered and instead was based on his overall experience in the sector. The accountable role should have belonged to the associate who had performed the due diligence on the deal, had the deepest expertise on the target, and was in fact advocating for investing in it.

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. It’s clear that major companywide decisions—such as the final approval of the firm’s yearly strategic priorities—may remain with senior leadership, with the CEO holding the accountable role. But the power to make a local decision, such as whether to make a moderate equipment investment at a specific plant, may rest further down the organization with the best-informed person, such as the plant’s manager. That might sound like a no-brainer, but you would be amazed at how frequently senior managers don’t sufficiently delegate decisions. RACI can help teams break free from rigid hierarchies—empowering employees, strengthening succession pipelines, and preventing executives from burning out.

We often challenge the senior leaders we work with to identify just four decisions a year where they are truly the only—and best—person to make the call. These tend to involve enterprisewide issues such as strategy, hiring or promoting people into senior positions, and company-shaping investments. For everything else, we ask a different question: How can you step out? That may mean shifting from an accountable role to a responsible, consulted, or informed one or questioning whether they need to be in the RACI at all.

Doing so is easier said than done. Forgetting about rank can be difficult; it takes awareness and practice. To help you and those around you shift between roles, you can embed RACI into everyday company tools like performance-management guides, meeting agenda templates, and Gantt charts for project management. These cues remind people to be explicit about the role they’re expected to play at any given moment. Over time the best teams develop the muscle to move fluidly among roles, increasing their agility and that of their organizations.

As a result of our coaching, MedTech’s leaders focused on revising meetings to help people play the RACI roles assigned to them for each decision. To do so, they first had a meeting about meetings. They agreed to stop including too many people in decision meetings and instead make sure each meeting was aligned with its RACI—for instance, that it would be attended by only the accountable person and those in the responsible roles for that decision. For every meeting they wrote out the specific goal for each agenda item (for example, “Decide on the head-count request for a hire to lead business unit X”) and the person accountable (in this case, the CHRO).

For each decision on the agenda, they also created meeting preparation materials summarizing the information they had gathered from people in the consulted and informed roles. And they set agenda schedules: for example, five minutes for the accountable person to clarify the decision at hand, 20 minutes for the accountable and the responsible people to engage as equals in a debate about the options, and five minutes at the end for the accountable person to make a final call based on the information gathered. After the meeting they coached and provided feedback to one another, individually and as a team, on how well they were playing their RACI roles.

All those efforts got the executives to stay in the lanes assigned to them for decisions. As a result, MedTech improved both its agility and the quality of its decisions.

. . .

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. It will give teams the confidence to move fast, adapt intelligently, secure buy-in, and share leadership in ways that make the whole organization more effective and resilient.

Copyright 2026 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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