Who Actually Decides? Process Is Not Hierarchy

Who in your company can say yes without asking you first? If the answer is a short list, that is not a sign of strong leadership. It is a sign that your structure is doing the deciding for you — and probably not in the way you intended.

The 1911 problem

Frederick Winslow Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911. His model — specialised roles, clear chains of command, decisions flowing upward — was designed for factory floors where consistency and control were the primary outputs. It worked. It spread. And it became the default blueprint for almost every organisation built in the century that followed, including ones that have nothing to do with manufacturing.

The problem is not that hierarchy is wrong. The problem is that it is often applied by default, without asking whether it fits the work. A retail expansion programme and an assembly line have different decision speeds, different information flows, and different costs when a decision is delayed. Treating them the same way produces the same result: the wrong people waiting for approval from the right people, and the right people too busy approving to think.

What the research actually says

Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report has tracked employee engagement for years. The consistent finding: only around 23 percent of employees globally are engaged at work. The strongest predictor of engagement is not pay, not perks, and not the office. It is whether people feel their opinions count and whether they have the opportunity to do what they do best every day. Both of those are structural questions. They are about who gets to decide, and whether the work is designed around the person doing it.

Research on autonomous teams — sometimes called self-managing teams or pods — consistently shows higher engagement and faster decision-making in environments where the work is complex and the outputs are hard to standardise. The trade-off is coordination cost. Small autonomous teams make fast local decisions but can create inconsistency at scale if the connective tissue between them is not well designed.

Neither model is universally better. The question is which one fits the work you are actually doing.

What I learned at Wild Fabrik

Wild Fabrik is a gifting and lifestyle brand that operates across multiple channels and markets. When I came in, the founder was the connective tissue between every team. Not because she wanted to be, but because the structure had not been built to work without her.

The shift was not about removing her from decisions. It was about being deliberate about which decisions needed her and which ones did not. We mapped the decision types, identified the ones that were genuinely strategic versus the ones that were operational, and then built the handoffs so that partners could fully own their teams and their outputs.

The result was not a flatter org chart. It was a clearer one. People knew what they owned. Approvals stopped being the bottleneck. And the founder got her calendar back for the work that actually needed her.

Setting up processes does not mean adding layers

This is the misunderstanding I run into most often. Founders resist process because they associate it with bureaucracy — more sign-offs, more meetings, more people who need to be consulted before anything moves. That is what bad process looks like. Good process does the opposite. It removes the need for sign-offs by making the decision criteria clear in advance. It reduces meetings by making the information available without a meeting. It finds the flow that fits the business, rather than importing a structure from somewhere else.

The question is not hierarchy versus autonomy. It is: what does this business actually need in order to move well? Start there, and the structure usually becomes obvious.