Finding the line between top-down and bottom-up decisions

As we're settling into a new organizational structure at Zapier, I'm spending quite a bit of time and energy thinking about decision-making.

Organizational change has a way of surfacing questions that normally stay hidden. Questions that don't matter much when everything feels stable suddenly become very important.

Who gets to decide this? How much input should people have? When should leadership make the call? When should teams decide for themselves?

The easy answer is that organizations should empower teams. Most leaders would agree with that statement. I would too. The harder question is what empowerment actually means.

Sometimes we talk about empowerment as though it means leaders should stay out of the way and let teams figure things out. Other times we talk about leadership as though its primary job is making decisions on behalf of everyone else. Neither description is quite right.

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A reorganization is a useful example.

The structure itself is fundamentally a leadership decision: which teams exist, what they own, where investments are made, and how the organization is designed all require context that extends beyond any one team. There are tradeoffs happening at the organizational level that aren't visible from inside a single group.

But something interesting happens once the structure is established. You're not quite done yet. You have new questions to answer. You move from discussing how the organization should be designed to how a team should operate within that design.

Every change in team changes the team's culture, even if it's just the loss of a team member or a new hire. It doesn't need to be a dramatic reorg, but these questions are most obviously needed when it is.

How should responsibilities be divided? How should planning work? Which processes are helping and which are getting in the way? How should the team collaborate? How should work get done?

These questions benefit from a completely different kind of context. They're best answered by the people living inside them every day. The longer I've been a leader, the more I've come to believe that many organizational problems are really decisions being made at the wrong level.

There's a delicate balance to walk here: you want to preserve team autonomy, but you also need a decision to be made. I've seen leaders spend weeks trying to build consensus around decisions that ultimately require leadership judgment. Everyone gets a voice, but nobody gets clarity. I've also seen leaders dictate decisions that would have been better made by the team. Everyone gets clarity, but nobody gets ownership.

Neither approach tends to work very well. The worst, though, is an inferred delegation of decision-making without being explicit: getting 50% of the way through a top-down decision and then saying "you can figure out the rest" without actually guiding what "the rest" entails. This is the space that usually causes the most stress in an organizational change, and why it's a delicate balance.

What I've really come to appreciate is that most healthy organizations aren't purely top-down or purely bottoms-up. They're both.

The boundary isn't always obvious. In fact, it's usually messy and inconsistent. Every organization draws the line a little differently, and even within the same organization the answer will inevitably change over time.

But I've become convinced that this is one of the most important responsibilities leaders have: understanding which decisions belong to them and which decisions don't.

As we've worked through the implications of our new structure, I've found that many of the conversations aren't really about the structure itself. They're about ownership: what leadership owns, what teams own, and where those two things overlap.

And it's transparently a difficult challenge with no clear answer. It's a lot of trial and error, and a lot of patience both from leadership and from the impacted teams.