“We can confer authority; but power or capacity, no man can give or take.” – Mary Parker Follett, Dynamic Administration (1942)

 

The Meeting That Went Well

The leadership meeting ends on a positive note.

The discussion was thorough, the options were weighed, and by the end everyone seemed aligned. There was clarity around the table. The decision felt made. People left the room knowing what needed to happen next.

There is a quiet satisfaction in moments like that. The sense that something important has moved forward.

And yet, three weeks later, very little has actually changed.

No one objected. No one argued the decision was wrong. No one deliberately ignored it. But somewhere between the room and the work, the momentum dissolved.

This is not unusual. In fact, it is one of the most common symptoms I see of unclear decision ownership in growing SMEs.

Nothing dramatic happens. The organisation simply carries on, as if the decision had been more a conversation than a turning point.

 

The Illusion of Completion

The moment a decision feels made, something shifts psychologically. The conversation concludes, tension eases, and there’s a sense of progress as the item gets ticked off the agenda.

But a decision without designated ownership isn’t really a decision. It’s an intention waiting for someone to action it.

In many growing businesses, decisions are treated as if articulating them guarantees completion. The assumption is that once something has been discussed and agreed, execution will naturally follow. After all, everyone understands what needs to happen – they were all in the room.

The execution gap lies between collective agreement – which feels like progress – and individual accountability, which actually drives it. Agreement creates alignment, but alignment doesn’t execute itself. It requires someone to carry the outcome from concept to completion. And if that someone isn’t named, explicitly and unmistakably, the decision exists only in theory.

 

Diffused Responsibility and the Politeness Problem

This issue becomes more visible as businesses grow.

In the early stages of an SME, responsibility sits quite clearly with the founder or a very small group of leaders. Decisions and actions are closely linked simply because the same people are involved in both.

Growth changes that.

Roles expand. Teams become more capable, and authority begins to spread across the organisation. What once sat clearly with the owner now lives somewhere in the space between functions, managers and departments.

This diffusion of responsibility is natural. In many ways it is a sign of organisational maturity, yet it also introduces a new kind of ambiguity.

In capable, respectful teams, people are often reluctant to assume decision ownership unless it has been made explicit. They do not want to step into territory that might belong to someone else, nor appear to overreach. So decisions drift into a kind of collective holding pattern, and the language around them changes accordingly.

“We agreed” becomes a shield. It sounds collaborative and feels responsible. But operationally, it means no one has actually picked up the thread.

I’ve noticed this is particularly pronounced in businesses where the culture values consensus. The stronger the preference for collective decision-making, the more likely it is that execution will stall in the absence of singular ownership. The very thing that makes the discussion feel inclusive creates ambiguity about who now carries the outcome.

And in that ambiguity, momentum quietly dies.

 

When Deciding and Delivering Become Different Things

Many leadership teams conflate two distinct questions: Who decides? and Who delivers?

A decision can be made collectively. In fact, in complex situations, collective decision-making often produces better outcomes because multiple perspectives reduce blind spots, and shared ownership of the logic builds commitment.

But execution requires a single owner.

The authority to decide and the authority to act are not the same thing. And ambiguity at this boundary creates the longest delays. Teams hesitate because they are not entirely sure whether they have the authority to move ahead. Founders wonder why things haven’t moved. Both believe the other should have initiated.

Nothing stalls dramatically – it simply waits.

This isn’t a failure of communication. It’s a structural gap. The handover between decision and delivery hasn’t been made explicit. The business has assumed that because everyone was present for the decision, everyone understands who now owns it.

They rarely do.

 

Language That Dissolves Decision Ownership

Language plays a surprisingly powerful role in this process. Not just what gets said, but how it distributes weight.

Many leadership teams naturally prefer inclusive phrasing. It signals collaboration and shared commitment.

“We’ll sort this out” sounds cooperative. It feels inclusive. But operationally, it’s a void. So is “let’s get this moving” or “we need to action this.” The intention is clear. The accountability isn’t.

Vague collective language – used sincerely, not carelessly – creates an execution gap by signalling commitment without assigning responsibility. And without a named individual who feels the weight of the outcome, follow-through depends on someone volunteering momentum.

In busy, stretched businesses, that rarely happens.

Research published in the Harvard Business Review suggests that one of the most common causes of project failure in organisations is what they describe as responsibility ambiguity – the gap between assumed and actual decision ownership. The problem is rarely that people don’t care. More often everyone assumes someone else has picked it up.

The words used in the meeting matter far more than most leaders realise. Not because they need to be formal or procedural, but because they need to be specific. Who carries this now? Whose outcome is it? Where does it live?

If those questions don’t have clear answers when people leave the room, the decision hasn’t really landed.

 

The Owner’s Unintended Holding Pattern

Founder-led SMEs often experience an additional dynamic.

Many owners reach a point where they recognise that decisions cannot continue to flow through them indefinitely. They begin consciously encouraging their team to take greater responsibility.

Decisions are “handed over” in principle. The team is told they have the authority. The parameters are clear. But something subtle remains unresolved. The team still senses they need implicit sign-off before proceeding – not because it’s been stated, but because it’s been the pattern.

The owner believes they’ve stepped back. The team experiences them as still holding the thread.

This isn’t about control. It’s about unintentional design. The business has scaled past the point where informal understanding works, but the operating structure hasn’t caught up. Decision rights haven’t been codified. Role boundaries remain partly implied, so people hesitate.

They wait. Not because they’re incapable or uncommitted, but because the architecture of accountability is still ambiguous. And in that gap, execution slows to the speed of reassurance rather than the speed of clarity.

The gap between perception and reality kills the momentum.

 

The Subtle Specificity Execution Depends On

Execution clarity isn’t about complexity. It’s about specificity.

In organisations where decisions travel well, something subtle is usually present. People know where responsibility for the outcome lives. Not abstractly, but specifically. They know whose responsibility it is, what finishing looks like, and when the outcome becomes visible.

This isn’t process bureaucracy. It’s basic operating hygiene in businesses that have outgrown informal understanding.

As Mary Parker Follett observed in the early twentieth century, authority can be conferred, but capacity cannot be handed over like a document. It must be lived, recognised, and structurally supported. Her work, now widely cited in organisational theory, remains strikingly relevant to modern SMEs.

In practice the shift required is smaller than many leaders expect. It rarely involves elaborate systems or formal tracking. More often it simply requires naming things that have previously been left implicit. Who owns this outcome? What does done look like? When do we expect to see it?

Three questions. But in their absence, decisions float.

The challenge is that this level of specificity can feel overly mechanical in a business that has always operated on trust and goodwill. It can feel like unnecessary formality is being introduced into relationships that have worked perfectly well for years.

But the relationships haven’t changed. The structure has. And what worked at twelve people doesn’t work at forty.

 

The Structural Question Beneath the Behaviour

The repeated pattern of decisions losing momentum isn’t a people problem. It’s a structural design problem.

Execution drift is a symptom of unclear operating structure – particularly around decision rights, role boundaries, and accountability architecture. When these things remain implicit in a growing business, friction increases. Not because people are less capable or less committed, but because the system no longer supports intuitive coordination.

This reframes the issue. The question shifts from “Why don’t they follow through?” to “What structural conditions would make follow-through the natural path of least resistance?”

That’s a fundamentally different question. And it positions the solution where it actually belongs – in the design of the business, not the behaviour of the people.

Scalable businesses don’t rely on heroic individuals, they rely on distributed capacity. And distributed capacity only works when authority, responsibility, and accountability are structurally clear. Not occasionally clarified. Structurally embedded.

 

The Pattern You Can’t Unsee

Once you start to notice how often decisions dissolve in the space between agreement and action, you see it everywhere.

Not as failure, or incompetence, but as the predictable consequence of organisational ambiguity under growth.

The question isn’t whether your business experiences this. Most do. The question is whether the operating structure of the business is evolving quickly enough to carry decisions forward once they have been made, or whether the organisation is still hoping that clearer conversations will eventually solve what is, in truth, a structural gap.

And that raises a more uncomfortable thought.

In your own leadership discussions, when the meeting ends and everyone leaves aligned…

where does the decision ownership actually live once the room is empty?

 

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