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Diary of a Leader: Why Decision Making in Growing Companies Gets Inconsistent
Quick answer: Decision making in growing companies gets inconsistent when the founder's judgment never gets written down. Each manager fills the gap with their own priorities. The fix is a short set of shared decision criteria for the calls that come up most, so the same situation lands the same way no matter who handles it.
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Real Stories, Leadership Lessons, and Personal Growth
A founder of an professional services firm told me about two emails that arrived the same week.
Both were from long-standing clients. Both asked for a small addition to a report that was already scoped.
One project manager said yes, absorbed the extra eight hours, and the client was delighted.
The other project manager sent a change order. That client called the founder directly to ask what had changed.
Both managers thought they had made the right call. Both could explain their reasoning. And the founder realized she would have made a third decision, different from either of them.
Welcome back to Diary of a Leader, where we explore what is really happening beneath leadership, growth, and the structures meant to support both.
What Happens to Decision Making in Growing Companies After the Founder Lets Go?
Decision making in growing companies usually follows the same arc.
At eight people, the founder makes most of the calls. Scope changes, discounts, schedule trade-offs, which client gets the senior person. The decisions are consistent because one head is making them.
Around fifteen or twenty people, that stops being possible. The founder hands the calls to project managers, team leads, an operations person. That is the right move.
What gets handed over is the authority. What stays behind is the reasoning.
So each person fills the gap with what they care about most. One manager protects the client relationship. Another protects margin. A third protects the schedule. None of them is wrong. They are each answering a slightly different question.
I see it show up in the same handful of places:
• Scope changes. One person absorbs the extra hours. Another bills them.
• Client exceptions. A deadline extension granted for one client and refused for the next.
• Pricing. Discounts that depend on who wrote the quote.
• Staffing. Who gets pulled onto an urgent job, and what gets bumped to make room.
• Quality calls. When a deliverable is good enough to send.
Why inconsistent decisions are so hard to spot
Each decision, on its own, looks defensible. Every manager can explain why they did what they did..
The problem only shows up in the pattern. And the pattern usually reaches the founder through the client.
The client compares notes with a colleague at another firm. A long-time client gets two different answers from two different people. Someone on the team quietly becomes known as the "hard" project manager, because they are the one who holds the line.
The costs are real, even when no one is tracking them:
• Margin leaks through hours absorbed by one manager and billed by another.
• Clients start asking for the person who says yes.
• Managers second-guess each other, or start checking with the founder again.
• The founder gets pulled back in to settle disagreements they thought they had handed off.
Inconsistent decisions are often the first sign that a growing company has delegated authority without delegating judgment.
Why Do Good Managers Make Different Calls on the Same Situation?
The first instinct is to look at the people.
Maybe one manager is too soft with clients. Maybe another is too rigid. Maybe they need training, or a talk about communication.
Sometimes that is part of it. But in most growing companies I work with, the managers are capable. They are working from different starting points, because no shared starting point exists.
Here is what usually sits underneath.
The founder's criteria live in their head
Founders make good calls quickly because they carry years of context. They know which clients are worth bending for. They know where margin is thin. They know which deadlines are real and which are soft.
Most of that knowledge is instinct. Ask a founder to explain how they decide on a scope change and the first answer is often "it depends."
It does depend. The trouble is that what it depends on has never been shared with the team.
The founder is often inconsistent too
This is the uncomfortable part.
When I ask founders to walk through their last five scope decisions, they usually find two or three different logics. A yes for the client they like. A firm line on a busy week. A discount when they were worried about the pipeline.
The team has been watching. They learned that the answer changes, so each of them built their own version.
Procedures cover the steps, and judgment is left out
Many firms try to solve this with a process document. It explains how to issue a change order: which form, who signs, where it gets filed.
It rarely explains when to issue one. That part is judgment, and judgment is exactly what got left behind when the authority moved.
Decision making in growing companies breaks down when people are handed the call and left to guess at the reasoning.
How Do You Build Decision Criteria Your Team Can Use?
The fix is a short set of shared decision criteria for the calls that come up most. A few questions everyone weighs the same way, and a clear line for when a call moves up.
Criteria are different from rules. A rule says "always bill for extra work." It breaks the first time a key client needs a favour. Criteria tell people what to weigh, so they can handle the exception and still land where the founder would.
Here is how I walk founders through it.
Step 1: Pick one decision
Start with the call that causes the most friction. In service businesses, it is usually scope changes. Pricing exceptions and staffing conflicts are close behind.
One decision. Done well. Then the next.
Step 2: Pull the last five to ten times it came up
For each one, write down who made the call, what they decided, and what happened after. Did the client stay happy? Did the project hold its margin? Did anyone have to clean it up?
This takes an hour. It is usually the most revealing hour of the whole exercise, because the inconsistency becomes visible on one page.
Step 3: Name what you are actually weighing
Sit down with the people who make this call. Go through the cases together and ask: what should have mattered here?
Most decisions come down to three or four factors. For a scope change, it is often the size of the ask, the health of the project's margin, the value of the relationship, and the precedent it sets.
The founder's job in this meeting is to explain their thinking. The managers' job is to push on it. Both sides usually learn something.
Step 4: Write the guiding questions and the line
Turn those factors into three or four questions. Then set the line: which calls the manager owns outright, and which ones come to someone else.
Here is an example for scope changes. The numbers will be different in your business.
Guiding question | Why it matters |
How many hours does this add? | Small asks build goodwill. Large ones change the project. |
Where is this project's margin today? | A healthy project can absorb a favour. A thin one cannot. |
Is this client a long-term relationship or a single job? | Relationship value changes how much flexibility makes sense. |
Would we be comfortable doing this for every client who asks? | Every yes becomes the expectation next time. |
And the line:
Under 4 hours, project margin on track: the project manager decides, and logs it.
4 to 15 hours: change order by default. The project manager can discount up to 10% if the relationship warrants it.
Over 15 hours, or a client relationship at risk: a ten-minute conversation with the founder or operations lead.
Step 5: Test it against past cases
Run the old decisions back through the new criteria. Would they have produced the call you wanted?
Where they would not, adjust the questions. This is where the criteria get sharp.
Step 6: Review it monthly for the first quarter
Keep a simple decision log. A shared sheet with the date, the client, the call, and one line on why is enough.
Once a month, spend twenty minutes as a team on the calls that felt hard. Those conversations are where managers build judgment. Over time, the founder hears fewer questions and sees more consistent answers.
Consistent decisions come from two things: shared criteria, and regular practice using them together.
The Question Worth Asking
Most founders ask:
"Why can't my managers get on the same page?"
The more useful question is:
"What page did I give them?"
Reflection Questions
Which decision in your business gets made differently depending on who is handling it?
If you wrote down how you make that call, would your last five decisions match it?
Where are clients noticing the difference before you do?
Which of your managers is carrying the reputation of being the "hard" one, simply for holding a line no one else holds?
Wrapping Up
The founder with the two scope emails did not need better project managers. She had good ones.
She needed to hand over the reasoning along with the authority. Once her team could see what she was weighing, they started landing in the same place, and her phone got quieter.
That is usually how it goes. Consistency follows clarity about what matters.
FAQ: How Workflow Design Stops Problems From Recurring
Why do managers make inconsistent decisions in a growing company?
Usually because they were given authority without the reasoning behind it. Each manager fills that gap with their own priorities, such as protecting the client, the margin, or the schedule. The result is several reasonable decisions that do not match.
What is the difference between decision criteria and a standard operating procedure?
A standard operating procedure describes the steps of a task, like how to issue a change order. Decision criteria describe what to weigh when deciding whether to do it at all. Most growing companies document the steps and leave the judgment undocumented.
How do inconsistent decisions affect client experience?
Clients notice when the answer depends on who they ask. Over time they learn which person says yes, and they start going around the others. Trust in the firm becomes trust in one individual.
How long does it take to make decisions more consistent?
One decision type can be mapped in a single working session. Expect the criteria to need adjusting over the first two or three months as real cases test them. Most teams see fewer escalations within the first quarter.
Can an outside operations leader help with decision making in growing companies?
Yes. An outside operations leader can pull the founder's reasoning into the open, facilitate the conversation with managers, and build the review rhythm that keeps criteria in use. This is a common part of an operational assessment or fractional operations engagement.
You Don't Need to Solve This All at Once
If this resonated, that is enough for now.
Awareness comes first. Clarity follows. Change comes later.
When you're ready to look at the structure underneath your business, that is where the real work begins.
You can connect with me at SOLVED Collective.
Continue Reading
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Stay tuned for more real-world reflections on leadership, operational clarity, and purposeful growth in the next installment of Diary of a Leader.
