Building a Transparent Decision-Making Framework for Your Team

Delegating decision-making responsibility is one of the scariest tasks for a leader. You can’t be in every meeting or make every judgment call. Empowering your team to make decisions is a superpower that can transform your organization and you can even do it while maintaining “Founder Mode”

The Opportunity in "It Depends"

Let’s start with an example of a common leadership decision: there’s a new engineering feature to build, and you need to decide whether Person A or Person B should do the work. Your first thought might be, “It depends.” Every time you find yourself saying this, it's an opportunity to improve your team's decision-making process. How? By defining a clear decision-making framework and providing transparency into how decisions are made.

Having an explicit decision-making framework won’t guarantee that every decision will be perfect. As you’ll see below, judgment is key when balancing different facets of a decision. However, the more effectively you communicate your framework, the more your team can align with your thought process and make decisions independently.

Decision-Making Framework

Decisions require balancing three core areas.

1. Team/Personnel: What Do We Want to Do?

This focuses on what’s best for the team. The complexity here arises from balancing factors like morale, career growth, individual interests, and skills. A major challenge often lies in the trade-offs between short-term gains and long-term benefits.

From our example, say Person A has expertise in this area of the codebase and has completed similar tasks before. Person A would be happy to do this work but doesn’t necessarily need to. Person B, on the other hand, is eager to learn, but the task would take them longer, risking the project’s deadline. What should you do?

2. Company/Strategy: What Do We Need to Do?

Here, the focus shifts to what the company or project needs to be successful. Success should be defined by objectives and outcomes, but in startups, it often boils down to survival—such as not running out of money.

In our example, allowing Person B to work on the feature could delay the project. Missing this deadline could put the next milestone at risk, and the team just missed the previous milestone. Missing the next milestone will likely greatly hurt the chances of future funding. What should you do? 

3. Core Values: What Must We Do?

Core values state what your company is willing to do—or not do—in pursuit of success. Compromising on values can lead to cultural drift, but it’s also important to remember that no team is perfect. If a trade-off is necessary, it’s better to make that decision openly and consciously.

From our example, if your company values hitting deadlines but also prioritizes employee career growth, you may feel caught between conflicting values. What should you do?

A Real-World Example

At Proletariat, this situation might play out like this:

Our company values skill development, but we also can’t afford to miss our next milestone after previously missing one. In this case, I would assign the task to Person A to ensure we meet the deadline and secure funding. If we hadn’t missed the previous milestone, I’d be more inclined to let Person B take on the work and invest in their long-term development.

The Power of Decision Transparency

You won’t always be able to outline every trade-off ahead of time, but that’s where decision transparency comes in. Taking the time to not just communicate decisions, but also explain the why behind them, helps your team understand the framework and improve their own decision-making. At Proletariat, we encouraged the team to ask “why” when they didn’t understand a decision. This fostered a culture of open decision-making, where everyone could learn from leadership’s approach to difficult decisions.