How Leadership Decisions Get Lost Inside Organizations

A leadership team makes a decision, and it is clear to the people present what changed and why.

Then the decision starts traveling.

One manager tells the team a priority has shifted. Another assumes everyone already knows this. Someone shares the new direction without explaining what people should do differently. Others hear pieces of it through meetings, email, chat, or changes in someone else’s behavior.

Eventually, different parts of the organization may be working from different versions of the same decision. Remember the game “Telephone”?

Sometimes that’s misalignment. But sometimes the decision simply never landed in a usable way.

How decisions get lost

Most leadership decisions do not arrive fully formed in a single conversation.

They develop over time. A priority changes, a project loses urgency, or new information changes the direction. Leaders discuss options across several meetings and eventually reach a point where the answer feels obvious.

The people involved have the benefit of all that context. The rest of the organization usually does not.

By the time the decision reaches them, they may hear only the conclusion. They know what changed, but not necessarily why. Or they hear the new direction without understanding what it means for their own work.

That gap is easy to underestimate when you participated in the conversations that produced the decision. You know which options were considered, which constraints shaped the discussion, and which assumptions everyone in the room now shares.

People farther from the decision are trying to make sense of the same conclusion without that context.

That translation is also happening in a workday already crowded with information. Microsoft’s 2025 research found that employees are interrupted by a meeting, email, or notification about every two minutes during core working hours. Separate Microsoft research found that the average employee receives more than 100 emails and 150 Teams messages each day.

Putting a decision into another meeting or message does not necessarily make it clearer. It may simply give an important decision one more place to get lost.

Make the decision usable

There is a difference between making a decision and making that decision usable.

When people are expected to act differently, they need enough information to connect the decision to their work. Depending on the situation, that may include what changed, what stayed the same, who owns what now, and what people should do differently because of the decision.

Without that translation, people fill in the blanks themselves.

One team may continue operating under the old priority because no one told them it had changed. Another may stop work that leadership still considers important. Two managers may interpret the same decision differently and give their teams conflicting directions.

From each team’s point of view, its response may make sense. But the teams are working from different information.

This is where I would be careful about labeling people resistant or poorly aligned before looking at what they were given to work from.

When using my Three Buckets framework as part of my leadership development work, I start with the Goals & Planning bucket. A decision may exist, but alignment is still incomplete if people cannot see how it changes direction, priorities, expectations, or ownership.

Test this by choosing one recent decision and tracing it back to its roots:

Who did the decision impact?

What did they think it meant?

What changed in their work afterward?

The answers may be different from what leadership intended.

That gives leaders something concrete to clarify rather than another reason to question people’s commitment.

It is also why “Does everyone understand?” may not tell you very much. People can understand the words and still interpret what those words require differently.

I would ask something closer to, “What changed for your team because of this decision?”

That question makes the interpretation visible. It may show that one team understood the new priority but not who owns it. Another group may have changed course while another impacted group continued following the old plan. An old metric may still be rewarding behavior the new decision was expected to change.

Ask these questions before lack of clarity turns into missed deadlines, conflicting instructions, or performance conversations.

Keep the decision from drifting

Even a decision that lands clearly can degrade over time.

A reasonable exception gets made, and then another. A customer situation requires an adjustment. One leader interprets the decision a little differently. New employees arrive after the original context has faded.

None of that is unusual, but it does show why decisions need to be revisited and reevaluated regularly.

Over time, people may be following a version that no longer reflects what leadership intended. Teams begin giving different answers to a question leaders believe was settled months ago. People may still support the direction and simply be unsure which version of the decision applies now.

This is often where the Workaround Bucket starts to fill. People create their own fixes, shortcuts, side conversations, or decision rules to keep the work moving when the original direction is no longer clear enough to follow.

The workaround may be showing you where the decision drifted, where ownership became unclear, or where the plan stopped matching the work.

A leadership decision has traveled successfully when the people affected can explain what changed and act from the same basic understanding.

When a team appears misaligned after a decision, trace the path the decision traveled, and look at the workarounds that formed along the way. Those workarounds may show you where clarity broke down long before the problem reached the people now being asked to explain it.

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