Leadership Team Decision-Making During Organisational Change

What Change Does to a Leadership Team’s Decision-Making

A leadership team that makes decisions reasonably well in stable conditions will often find those capabilities under significant strain when change arrives. This is not because the team has become less capable. It’s because change creates a set of conditions that expose and amplify weaknesses in collective decision-making that were previously manageable.

Research by Ruth Wageman and Richard Hackman identifies three ways leadership teams consistently waste time: spending energy on matters that don’t require collective attention; getting caught in irresolvable conflicts on important matters; and cutting discussions short by agreeing to disagree without resolving anything. During change, each of these failure modes becomes more costly — because the decisions that need to be made are more consequential, and the cost of getting them wrong is higher.

If your team’s general decision-making foundations are still being built, start with Leadership Team Decision-Making, which addresses how leadership teams build strong collective decision-making as an enduring capability. This page focuses on what change specifically adds to that challenge.

Why Change Makes Decision-Making Harder

Change does not simply add pressure to existing decision-making patterns. It introduces conditions that require different decision-making disciplines. During change, Information is incomplete and arrives unevenly. In stable times, most decisions can wait for complete or more information.

During change different leaders are more likely to hold different pieces of information. Without a deliberate mechanism for integrating information across the team, each leader decides on what they know rather than what the team as a whole knows. The result is decisions that are individually rational but collectively inconsistent.

Change creates new decision categories. New situations and questions arise that existing structures do not reliably answer: Who decides what gets paused? Who has authority over pace? Who arbitrates when two evolving functions’ priorities conflict? If the leadership team has not addressed these questions explicitly, they get answered informally, inconsistently, and often after the damage is visible.

Pressure shortens the time available for genuine deliberation. The more urgent the change feels, the more tempting it is to move quickly through decisions rather than work through them properly. Is this actually necessary for any given decision? What are the consequences of taking more time to make the decision?

Each of these conditions makes the team more vulnerable to the three failure modes that follow.

Three Decision-Making Failure Modes During Change

The conditions above — incomplete information, unclear decision categories, and pressure to move — predictable produce one or more of the following patterns.

Escalation. Decisions that should be made below the leadership team level are pushed upward. Because accountability is unclear, or because leaders below the top team don’t feel they have authority or sufficient information to decide. Over centralisation takes hold and the leadership team becomes a bottleneck. The pace of change slows. The leadership team spends its collective time on less strategic decisions rather than leading the change. Over centralisation as a result fo pressure to decide quickly can also harm the quality of decision-making through a lack of diverse inputs and views.

Avoidance. Change surfaces decisions that involve real, often new, trade-offs, genuine disagreements, or information that is uncomfortable to surface. Under pressure to keep things moving, teams defer these decisions or discuss them without reaching resolution.

False Consensus. Perhaps the most common failure mode during change, and the most insidious. The team appears to agree in the room — no objections, everyone nodding — but the agreement is thin. Leaders leave the meeting with different understandings of what was decided, and the change is implemented differently across different parts of the organisation. The signs that the agreement was false surface in execution, precisely when it is hardest to address.

Signs Your Leadership Team’s Decision-Making Is Under Strain During Change

• Decisions agreed in leadership team meetings are being revisited or quietly amended at the functional level.

• The leadership team is spending too much of its collective time on operational matters, not on leading the change.

• Leaders below the leadership team consistently escalate decisions that they should own upward.

• Different functions are operating on different assumptions about what has been decided.

• The same decision appears to have been made more than once, without the earlier version being clearly changed.

• Leaders leave meetings with different understandings of what was agreed.

• Genuinely difficult trade-offs are being avoided or deferred rather than resolved.

Two or more of these patterns presenting consistently is a reliable signal that the team’s decision-making is underperforming and needs to be addressed.

How Coaching Builds Decision-Making Clarity During Change

Coaching does not make decisions for a leadership team. It facilitates an environment, usually workshops, where the team can safely and build the processes, skills and disciplines that allow the team to make better decisions — faster, with genuine collective ownership, and in a way that holds up under the pressures change creates.

Clarifying the new decision landscape. One of the most important and most neglected pieces of work at the start of a change initiative is to be explicit about which decisions the change creates that did not exist before, who owns them, and what the escalation path looks like when circumstances shift unexpectedly. McKinsey’s research on decision rights consistently finds that organisations have too many people involved in too many decisions — a problem that intensifies when change disrupts existing accountability structures. Coaching helps the team create that clarity as a practical agreement, not a governance exercise.

Establishing a reprioritisation principle. Change rarely unfolds as planned. When circumstances shift — and they will — the team needs an agreed principle for how priorities are reconsidered. Which decisions get made at pace? What is the threshold for convening the full team? Who has authority to call the team together on a decision that wasn’t anticipated? A team that has answered these questions in advance maintains its decision-making coherence when the ground moves. A team that hasn’t discovers the gaps at the worst possible moment.

Creating the conditions for genuine agreement. False consensus during change is harder to address than it sounds, because it typically reflects something real — a concern about the safety of being the one who objects, or a reluctance to slow a change initiative already under pressure. This is directly connected to the work of building trust within the team under pressure — without sufficient trust and psychological safety, the conditions that enable genuine agreement cannot exist. Coaching provides a facilitated space in which real disagreements can be surfaced and worked through at the leadership team level, before they surface in implementation.

This work sits alongside the operational demands of leading change. The goal is not a leadership team that makes perfect decisions. It is a leadership team whose decisions, once made, hold — across functions, over time, and under pressure.

Who This Is For

• Chief executives and managing directors who want their leadership team to make faster, cleaner, more consistent decisions during a change initiative.

• Boards and chairs concerned that the pace of change is being slowed by unclear decision rights or unresolved disagreements at the leadership team level.

• HR directors and people leaders supporting a change programme who want to address decision-making clarity as part of broader leadership team development.

• Leadership teams who recognise that the way they make decisions is not keeping up with what the change requires of them.

How Archetype Works on Leadership Team Decision-Making During Change

Archetype’s leadership team coaching is delivered by Tony Gardner and Emma Holderness.

Tony is a former chief executive and board chair with over 25 years of real-world leadership experience, combined with deep expertise in systemic leadership team coaching. Tony is based in Auckland.

Emma is a former RNZAF officer and Chief People Officer with extensive leadership development and coaching experience. Emma is based in Wellington.

Engagements focused on decision-making during change typically include:

• Initial discussion about how the team is currently making decisions — what is working, what is stalling, and why.

• A facilitated workshop to clarify decision rights, establish an escalation framework, and agree on how the team will make collective decisions during the change.

• And potentially one or more follow-up workshops or coaching to maintain those disciplines under pressure, and to address the specific patterns — avoidance, false consensus, escalation — as they emerge.

Explore our full approach to Leadership Team Coaching.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is decision-making during change different from decision-making in general?

In stable conditions, a leadership team can absorb a degree of ambiguity in how it makes decisions. Change removes that tolerance. New decision categories arise that existing structures don’t answer. Information is incomplete and uneven. Pressure accelerates the team’s worst decision-making patterns. The general disciplines of collective decision-making still apply — but change adds specific structural demands that need to be addressed explicitly.

See Leadership Team Decision-Making for the foundation.

What are the most common decision-making failure modes during change?

Escalation — decisions pushed upward that should be owned below the leadership team, creating a bottleneck. Avoidance — difficult decisions deferred or discussed without resolution. And false consensus — the team appears to agree in the room, but different leaders leave with different understandings of what was decided. All three are predictable responses to change pressure, and all three are directly addressable through coaching.

What does “decision rights” mean during a change initiative?

Change creates new decisions that didn’t exist before — about what gets paused, who owns pace, and how differences between functions are resolved. Decision rights during change means being explicit about who owns these new decisions, what requires collective leadership team resolution, and what the escalation path is when circumstances shift unexpectedly. Without that clarity, gaps get filled informally and inconsistently.

How is decision-making connected to alignment during change?

They are directly connected. A leadership team that is misaligned on priorities will struggle to make collective decisions, because the decision-making process surfaces underlying disagreements. And a team that makes decisions poorly — through avoidance or false consensus — will struggle to maintain alignment, because different leaders interpret the gaps differently.

See Leadership Team Alignment During Organisational Change.

When should a leadership team do this work — before the change or during it?

Both, at different levels of depth. The structural work — clarifying decision rights and establishing an escalation framework — is most valuable when done before the change accelerates, or at the point of launch. Addressing the patterns that emerge under pressure — avoidance, false consensus, escalation — is ongoing work when they emerge during the change. Starting earlier is always more efficient than repairing later.

Does this work sit alongside change management consulting, or instead of it?

Alongside. Change management consulting focuses on the change programme itself — the plan, sequencing, and stakeholder engagement. Leadership team coaching focuses on the team leading the programme — its collective capability to make decisions, hold alignment, and model the behaviours the change requires. For complex or high-stakes change initiatives, both are more effective when coordinated rather than run separately.

Take the First Step

Clear, collective decision-making is not a given — even for experienced leadership teams. But it is buildable, and the earlier the work begins, the more it shapes the change rather than responds to its consequences.

To explore whether leadership team coaching is right for your team and the change you are navigating, contact Archetype for a no-obligation conversation.