Unclear Decision Authority: Why Meetings Keep Multiplying

Most leaders have sat through a meeting and wondered why half the people in the room needed to be there.

The issue gets discussed. Everyone gives their perspective. Questions are answered. Someone takes notes. Then, just when it seems like the group is ready to move forward, someone says:

“We should probably run this by leadership.”

And there it is.

The meeting wasn't really the problem.

Unclear decision authority was. The people in the room didn't have the authority to finish what they started.

That's worth paying attention to in 2026 because organizations now have technology that can make almost everything surrounding a meeting more efficient. AI can prepare an agenda, summarize the discussion, capture action items, identify unanswered questions and draft the follow-up before everyone is back at their desks.

Yet none of that answers a very basic operational question:

Who can make the call?

You can make the meeting more efficient without making the decision process more efficient.

And if the decision still has to travel through three more people before the work can move, that's exactly what you've done.

Some meetings are doing the work of the operating structure

There are meetings that clearly need to exist.

Production meetings coordinate upcoming work. Project reviews surface schedule, cost and risk.

Planning meetings establish priorities. Technical reviews bring the right expertise to a problem.

Then there are meetings that start with:

“We need to get everyone together on this.”

Whenever that happens, it's worth asking why.

Sometimes everyone really does need to be there.

Other times, getting everyone together is how the organization deals with uncertainty.

One manager doesn't want to commit another department. Someone has an opinion but isn't sure they have the authority to act on it. Another person believes leadership should weigh in. Nobody wants to make a decision that gets reversed later.

So the organization puts everyone in a room.

At that point, the meeting is doing more than coordinating people. It's compensating for authority that hasn't been clearly placed anywhere else.

Research backs up how often meetings end without that clarity. Atlassian surveyed 5,000 knowledge workers and found that 77% frequently attended meetings that ended with another meeting being scheduled. More importantly, 54% frequently left meetings without a clear understanding of next steps or who owned which task.

That's not just a meeting-efficiency problem.

If people can spend an hour discussing an issue and still leave without knowing who owns the next move, there is something worth examining underneath the meeting.

Unclear Decision Authority Has a Language

Unclear authority has a language.

“I don't want to speak for them.”

“Can we get Finance in here?”

“I think we can do that, but I want to make sure leadership agrees.”

“Who needs to sign off on this?”

“Let's bring this back next week.”

None of those statements automatically signals a problem. Some decisions absolutely require additional expertise, approval or review.

The pattern matters.

If routine operational decisions repeatedly need another person, another conversation or another meeting before anyone feels comfortable moving, I'd stop looking at the meeting and start looking at

the decision path.

Who owns the decision?

Who provides input?

Who has approval authority?

And does everyone involved understand the difference?

Decision-rights research has been making this point for years, and it remains relevant. Harvard

Business Review has documented how ambiguity over who gets to decide can create bottlenecks between functions, business units and levels of an organization. In 2026, HBR returned to the subject again, examining what companies continue to get wrong about decision rights.

The technology around decision-making has changed dramatically.

The organizational question underneath it hasn't.

Follow the decision, not the meetings

Meeting volume can be misleading because each meeting may have a perfectly reasonable explanation.

A group meets because there's a problem.

They decide leadership needs to weigh in.

Leadership reviews it and asks for more information.

Someone gathers the information.

The original group reconvenes and develops a recommendation.

The recommendation goes back for approval.

Then another meeting communicates the decision to the people responsible for carrying it out.

Look at each meeting separately and you can probably justify every one of them.

Follow the decision instead.

One decision may have traveled through four meetings, three levels of management and several

days before reaching someone who could actually authorize the next move.

Now the problem looks different.

Instead of asking, “Why are we having so many meetings?” ask:

“Why did this decision have to travel this far?”

That's a much more useful leadership question.

Input has a way of becoming permission

Cross-functional decisions need input.

Operations may need Engineering's technical perspective. Finance may need to explain the financial implications. Procurement may know something about a supplier that changes the options.

Quality may identify a requirement others haven't considered.

That input makes decisions better.

But organizations can slowly start treating everyone who should inform a decision as someone who must agree with it.

That's when the room gets bigger.

One person is there because they have relevant information. Another is invited because the decision affects their department. Someone's manager joins because the issue feels important. A senior leader gets added for visibility.

Soon, ten people are discussing a decision that may have required input from four people and authority from one.

There is a meaningful difference between:

“I need your expertise before I decide.”

and

“I need your permission before I decide.”

When that difference isn't clear, input starts becoming approval.

And once enough people believe their agreement is required, the meeting becomes the decision process.

AI doesn't remove the authority question

This is where 2026 gets interesting.

Deloitte's 2026 Global Human Capital Trends research found that 60% of executives now regularly

use AI to support their decisions. But Deloitte also found that many organizations are still struggling with decision maturity: 57% of organizations in its cited decision-intelligence research operated at low decision-making maturity.

Deloitte's conclusion is especially relevant here: as AI becomes more involved in decisions, organizations need clearer decision rights, not fewer of them.

Because we're no longer only deciding which person has authority.

Organizations now have to determine what AI can recommend, what it can execute, when human approval is required, when something should escalate and who remains accountable for the outcome.

Consider what that looks like operationally.

An AI system reviews the information and recommends an action in seconds.

The manager receives the recommendation but isn't sure whether they can approve it.

The director isn't sure whether the issue requires executive review.

Someone wants Finance involved because there's financial exposure.

Leadership gets added because nobody wants to make the wrong call.

And someone schedules a meeting.

The analysis happened at machine speed.

The authority structure didn't.

That's the part leaders need to pay attention to.

AI can remove administrative work around a decision. It can provide better information. It can identify patterns humans might miss. It can make routine work happen much faster.

But if nobody knows where authority begins and ends, the decision can still sit there waiting for a person.

Senior leadership can accidentally become the approval system

There are decisions that belong at the top.

Strategy. Significant capital commitments. Material risk. Major changes affecting the direction of the business.

Senior leaders should make those calls.

Routine operating decisions are different.

When those decisions repeatedly reach senior leadership, the natural conclusion is often that managers need to take more ownership.

Sometimes they do.

But I'd look at what the organization has taught them first.

Has a manager made a reasonable decision before and had it reversed?

Are two departments claiming authority over the same issue?

Does the written process say one thing while the organization operates another way?

Is a leader routinely stepping into decisions because it's faster than clarifying who should own them?

If so, escalation may be perfectly rational.

The manager has learned that asking is safer than deciding.

That's why telling people to “take ownership” isn't enough.

Responsibility and authority have to travel together.

Leadership has to make the boundaries visible.

What decisions should come to me?

What decisions should not?

Where can managers act without permission?

What conditions require escalation?

And when someone makes a reasonable decision within their authority, will leadership support the decision even if they personally would have chosen differently?

That last part matters.

People don't learn authority only from policies and org charts.

They learn it from what leaders approve, reverse, question and reinforce.

Meetings are taking more of the workday, not less

For all the technology available to us, the coordination load hasn't disappeared.

Microsoft's workplace telemetry found employees were interrupted, on average, every two minutes

during core work hours by a meeting, email or message. It also found that 57% of meetings were ad hoc rather than scheduled, while large meetings were the fastest-growing meeting type.

That's useful context, but I wouldn't look at those numbers and conclude that organizations simply need fewer meetings.

I'd ask what all that coordination is trying to accomplish.

If people are constantly gathering because work crosses functions, decisions need input and information moves quickly, some of that coordination is legitimate.

But if the same decisions keep appearing in different rooms, senior leaders routinely have to join before work can move, or meetings repeatedly end with someone needing approval from somebody who wasn't there, that's telling you something.

The calendar may be showing you where the operating structure is unclear.

Look at the decisions that keep bringing people back into the room

Recurring meetings aren't automatically bad.

Organizations need cadence. Projects need coordination. Leaders need visibility.

Recurring decisions are more interesting.

If the same type of issue keeps coming back to the same meeting, ask why it couldn't be resolved

before it got there.

If senior leaders routinely attend operational meetings, look at what decisions are waiting for them.

If a meeting can't be canceled because everyone worries something will fall through the cracks, find out what the meeting is holding together.

If people routinely leave meetings needing approval from someone who wasn't in the room, ask why the decision path wasn't clear before the meeting started.

Those patterns tell you something the number of meetings on the calendar can't.

They show where the organization may have substituted meetings for clear authority.

And AI makes that distinction more important.

We're entering a period where information can move faster, analysis can happen faster and routine work can be completed faster than organizations have ever experienced.

Authority has to keep up.

Otherwise, companies will have AI producing recommendations in seconds, automated systems moving work instantly and people still waiting until Thursday's meeting to find out whether they're allowed to proceed.

That's not a technology problem.

And it's not really a meeting problem.

It's a leadership structure problem.

So the next time a meeting feels repetitive, crowded or strangely difficult to eliminate, don't start by asking whether the meeting should exist.

Ask:

What decision keeps bringing us into this room, and why can't the people closest to it make the call?

The answer will tell you far more about how the organization operates than the meeting ever will.