HR leaders are often asked why decision making across the business is stalling, why priorities keep slipping and why teams feel permanently busy, despite no discernable increase in productivity. Decision latency – the time between when a decision is needed and when a decision is actually made – is often the cause of these issues.
When decisions move slowly, costs go up and workloads increase. Trust goes down and people stop believing that raising issues leads to action, so they disengage or bypass formal routes. For this reason, decision latency can have just as much impact on employee performance as psychological safety or culture.
The root cause usually lies in how the decision making is designed. Where decision making is unclear and governance is overcrowded, accountability can become diluted. Deferring decision making can reduce the risk for individuals who are fearful of making the wrong call but, without a definitive decision, work can stall and teams can lack a clear direction.
By redesigning the decision-making process, HR can help their organisations move at the speed their strategy requires. There are five changes that HR leaders can implement:
- Treat decision latency as a measurable risk. Track a handful of high-friction decisions and measure the time from an issue being raised to a decision being made and communicated. Plot this alongside delivery impact, work created, customer exposure and leadership time burned.
- Reset decision rights with a model people can actually use. For the decisions that matter, define who decides, who must be consulted and who executes the decisions. Keep it tight, restrict consultation by time and ensure queries are clear.
- Fix the governance mechanics that produce slow decisions. Most forums are designed for updates, not choices. Make it mandatory for every meeting to include the decision required, options, trade-offs and a recommendation. Get rid of alignment meetings that have no decision authority – if a forum cannot decide, it isn’t a decision forum.
- Stop rewarding relitigation. If someone wants to reopen a decision, it should require a new fact, a changed risk or measurable impact. Make decision clarity a leadership standard.
- Standardise decision communication so decisions stick. Many decisions reopen because people don’t understand what has changed and what to do next. Equip managers with a simple template that helps with the review process.
Decision latency isn’t a personality problem, it’s a design problem. By providing clarity on who makes a decision and when it is needed, organisations can become more agile and improve performance.
Aggie Yemurai Mutuma is CEO of Mahogany Inclusion Partners
