Who Decides? Why Role Clarity is a Project Delivery Issue
Ask a project team who owns a decision, and watch what happens.
Sometimes you get a clear answer. More often, there’s a pause. A glance around the table. A careful, “Well, it depends.”
And that pause may be part of why the project is moving more slowly than everyone wants it to.
Last week, I wrote about why project team capacity is a delivery risk.
Capacity matters, but sometimes what feels like a capacity problem has another condition underneath it:
Clarity.
People are working. Calendars are full. Meetings are multiplying, and still, the work isn’t moving.
Not because people aren’t doing enough, but because decisions keep looping, ownership isn’t clear, or nobody’s quite sure who has the authority to make the call.
After nearly three decades doing this work, unclear roles, ownership and decision rights are among the most common sources of friction I’ve seen inside project teams.
And because teams get very good at working around ambiguity, that friction can exist for a long time before anyone names what’s underneath it.
The cost of “I thought you had it”
The everyday version of this is so ordinary that it can become almost invisible.
Two people both believe they own the same piece of work, so they duplicate it, or each waits for the other to move.
A decision needs to be made, but no one is sure they have the authority, so it goes up a level. Then perhaps another. Something important falls between two functions because each assumed it belonged to the other.
A decision gets made and then reopened because someone who believed they had approval authority wasn’t involved. Nobody has to be careless for any of this to happen.
The ownership was never clear enough to begin with.
And there’s an important distinction here.
Knowing what you own isn’t always the same as knowing what you can decide.
You can be accountable for an outcome and still be unclear about which decisions you’re authorized to make.
Responsibility tells me what I’m here to do. Decision rights tell me where I’m allowed to make the call.
A healthy project team needs enough shared understanding of both.
If you want to find the lost time, follow the decisions
Decision-making is part of a project team's everyday work.
But when decision roles aren't clear, the work around the decision can become bigger than the decision itself.
One decision may touch technology, operations, finance, HR and the business. Input may be needed from all five.
But input isn't the same as authority.
If nobody knows who owns the final call, the number of people involved can grow quickly, and another meeting gets booked.
The decision gets escalated. Someone who wasn't included earlier gets brought in. The question gets reopened.
The team spends more time talking about the decision without getting any closer to making it.
Recent McKinsey research on team effectiveness reinforces this point. Their research found that teams scoring above average on decision-making were 2.8 times more innovative than teams scoring below average. They also found that teams are frequently unclear about each person's role in the decision-making process
Clarity isn’t bureaucracy. It can be what allows a team to move.
Written down doesn’t necessarily mean clear
Most project teams aren’t operating without governance.
There may be a RACI, a governance model, a decision matrix, a project charter. Roles may already be documented somewhere. And the team can still be unclear. Because:
Clarity doesn’t exist because something is written down. It exists when people share enough understanding to know how to act.
That’s a different standard.
A document can say who’s accountable. A conversation reveals whether everyone interprets that accountability the same way.
A governance model can show where a decision sits. A real project tests whether people trust that decision to stay there once pressure rises.
I’ve written before that project decisions create organizational conditions. Unclear decision rights create conditions too: waiting, escalation, workarounds and decisions that don’t hold.
This is why I don’t think role clarity is primarily a template exercise.
The tool can support the conversation. It can’t replace the conversation.
McKinsey makes a similar distinction in its work on decision rights: labels such as responsible, accountable and consulted can still leave people uncertain about who has authority to make the final decision.
For me, this is where shared understanding matters most.
The goal isn’t to define every role perfectly or anticipate every decision the project will face. It’s to build enough shared understanding that when ambiguity appears, the team knows how to navigate it together.
Why clarity can be harder than it looks
Sometimes ambiguity is structural. The project changed, but the roles didn’t change with it. A new function became involved. The scope expanded. Someone left. An issue crossed a boundary nobody anticipated. And sometimes getting clear touches something more human.
Authority.
Hierarchy.
History.
Trust.
An unresolved tension about who’s been making the decisions all along.
Naming ownership out loud can feel exposing. If I say I own something, I’m also making my accountability visible. And clarifying who has decision authority can surface differences that were easier to leave unspoken.
That’s why a new RACI alone doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.
Real clarity requires conversation.
People need to surface different interpretations, ask questions, understand where authority begins and ends, and name the places where ownership overlaps or remains uncertain. That’s human work, not administrative work.
And it’s part of why role clarity isn’t something we establish at kickoff and assume will hold for the life of the project.
As the work changes, we need to revisit clarity.
Creating the space for those conversations is part of Project Team Alignment work, not to eliminate every ambiguity, but to help teams see what’s getting in the way and build enough shared understanding to keep moving.
What clarity looks like on a project team
You can often feel the difference.
When a decision needs to be made, the team knows how to determine who owns the call. People understand when their input is needed without assuming that giving input means having veto power.
Decisions are made at the appropriate level instead of travelling up the hierarchy for cover. When circumstances change, the team knows when a decision needs revisiting rather than reopening it because someone wasn’t comfortable with the outcome.
Handoffs become clearer because people understand where their responsibility ends and someone else’s begins.
And when something falls into a grey area as it inevitably will, the team has a way to work through it.
The goal isn’t a project without friction.
It’s a team that can navigate friction without losing unnecessary time, trust and momentum to ambiguity.
Role clarity is a Project Team Readiness issue
This is where role clarity connects to the larger conversation I’ve been having about Project Team Readiness.
Last week, I wrote about capacity as one part of readiness.
Clarity is another.
Does the team understand what success requires? Do people know what they own? Do they understand where their authority begins and ends? Do they know who needs to provide input and who ultimately decides?
And when the answers aren’t obvious, does the team know how to work them out?
We don’t answer these questions once at kickoff.
Projects evolve.
Pressure rises.
People change.
Decisions become more complex.
Roles that were clear three months ago can become less clear as the work moves.
Project Team Readiness isn’t a gate we pass through. It’s a condition we keep building throughout delivery, and role clarity is part of that work.
If your project keeps circling the same decisions
Pay attention to the pattern.
The same questions keep coming back. Choices get reopened. Meetings multiply. Decisions travel further up the organization than they need to.
People work hard, but progress doesn’t seem to match the effort.
Before you assume you need more capacity, get curious about clarity.
Who owns what?
Who gets to decide?
Where does authority begin and end?
And does the team share the same understanding of those answers?
Those aren’t administrative questions.
They’re Project Team Readiness questions.
This is part of what Project Team Alignment exists to support: the messy middle of delivery, where roles can blur, and decision-making can become harder under pressure.
If your team keeps circling the same decisions, I’d love to talk it through.
No pressure. Just a conversation about where things are getting stuck and what might need to become clearer.
Book a coffee chat with me here.
Because a team can’t create clarity downstream if it doesn’t have enough clarity inside the team itself.
Lisa Blanchet, Champion of People-Centric Change
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