Why employees make baffling decisions

Is this familiar? A direct report makes a decision that seemed reasonable to them and baffling to everyone else. Their manager's instinct is to question their judgment, their understanding of priorities, or their commitment to the team's goals. Occasionally that instinct is right. Often it isn't.

The more useful question is not what the person was thinking. It is what they were working with. What did they actually know about what success looked like, what they were authorized to decide, what constraints applied, and how their work connected to everything happening around them? In most cases, the honest answer is: not enough.

Good decisions don't start with the person making them. They start with getting good input. Not just information about why something matters, but everything an employee needs in order to exercise good judgment before and after the instructions run out.

These are the four mayor clusters:

What they're trying to achieve

The first thing an employee needs is clarity about what they are actually trying to achieve — not just the task, but what a successful outcome looks like and how it will be measured. Managers may assign work with a clear goal in mind and leave the quality requirements, success metrics, and timeline constraints implicit — assuming the employee shares their picture of what good looks like. Often they don't. The result is work that is completed competently and misses the point.

Why it matters and how it connects

The second thing an employee needs is an understanding of why their work matters and how it connects to everything around it. Why is this goal a priority now? How does it connect to what the organization is trying to achieve? Who else is working on related things, and at what points do those efforts need to align? Without this, employees make locally reasonable decisions that are globally misaligned — optimizing for their own goal without understanding how it trades off against competing priorities elsewhere. They aren't making bad decisions. They are making decisions with an incomplete picture of what a good decision actually requires.

What they're empowered to do

The third thing an employee needs is clarity about what they are actually empowered to do. What decisions are theirs to make, and which require escalation? What resources: budget, personnel, or time do they have access to, and what constraints apply? What policies or requirements govern how they operate? These are not bureaucratic details. They are the structural boundaries within which good judgment can actually function. An employee who doesn't know the boundaries of their authority will either over-step them, by making calls that weren't theirs to make; or they will under-use them, by escalating decisions they were perfectly capable of handling themselves. Both are predictable consequences of a setup that left those boundaries unclear.

How the communication loop works

The fourth thing an employee needs is clarity about how the communication loop works. How often does the manager need to be updated, and in what form? When is escalation required, and when is it not? Who else needs to know what is happening, and at what points? These questions are rarely answered explicitly at the start of an engagement. Instead, monitoring and feedback arrangements emerge informally, which means they emerge differently for every employee, sometimes in ways that feel like micro-management rather than support, and sometimes in ways that feel like abandonment rather than oversight. When communication rules are established clearly from the outset, the manager can let go without anxiety and the employee can operate without second-guessing whether they should be checking in. That is not a trust problem. It is a design problem.

The manager's responsibility — and the employee's

Most managers handle the first cluster naturally: they assign the goal, set the deadline, and trust the team to execute. But in fast-moving organizations, the rest of the framework is easily overlooked. The strategic rationale is left unstated, authority boundaries remain implicit, and resources are assumed rather than confirmed. Communication loops form informally, if at all.

As a result, when execution drifts, when teams misalign, or when escalation happens too late, it is treated as an individual performance issue. In other words, the friction is misdiagnosed as a gap in skill, judgment, or motivation rather than as a missing foundation of context. And context is primarily the manager's responsibility to provide, and the employee's responsibility to ask for. It is, after all, in their own interest to make sure they have what they need before they take ownership of an accountability.

True empowerment isn't about giving an employee a task and letting go; it’s about building the structural architecture that allows them to succeed when they are on their own. When you give your team full context, you aren't just managing execution — you are giving them the freedom to actually use their full potential.

Alexander Spradling, PhD, is an organizational consultant and executive coach based in Austin, Texas. He writes Why Organizations Misbehave.