Your Managers Are Passing Your Decisions Along Without the Reasons

When a decision travels from the founder through a manager to the team, the reasons often fall off on the way. A three-line note keeps them attached, so people can make the next call themselves.

You make a decision, and a manager passes it on to the team. The team hears what was decided. Often they do not hear why.

That gap is easy to miss because nothing goes wrong straight away. People do what was decided. But when a similar situation comes up, they cannot apply the thinking, because they were never given it. So the question comes back up the line.

Clarity has been slipping

Gallup's tracking of the U.S. workforce shows how widespread this has become. Just 46% of employees clearly know what is expected of them at work, down 10 points from 56% in March 2020, according to Gallup's report on engagement.

Managers are feeling it too. Global manager engagement fell from 27% to 22% between 2024 and 2025, according to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report.

A manager handed decisions without reasons is in an awkward spot. They are accountable for the call and unable to defend it, so the safest move is to send every new question back to the founder.

Why the reasons fall off

Nobody strips them out on purpose. A founder makes a call quickly, often in the middle of something else, and passes on the outcome because that is the urgent part. The manager relays what they were told. By the time it reaches the team, it is an instruction with no context.

The cost shows up later, as a steady flow of questions that look new but are really the same decision wearing a different client's name.

The three-line decision note

For any call you expect to come up again, write three lines before you pass it on. The note needs about two minutes.

Line one: what we decided

The outcome, plainly. "We are not discounting renewals this quarter."

Line two: why

The real reason, including the trade-off you accepted. "Delivery costs went up, and a discount would make renewals our least profitable work. We would rather lose a small client than carry that."

Line three: when it would change

The condition under which you would decide differently. "If a renewal also brings a new project, bring it to me." This is the line that lets people make the next call themselves.

Send the note with the decision, through the manager, so it travels intact. Over a few months the notes become more useful than a policy manual: a record of how the business actually decides.

What changes when the reasons travel

The manager can defend the call because they understand it. The team can handle the next similar case without escalating it. And the founder gets fewer questions that are really repeats.

The note also tells you something. If you cannot write line two in a sentence, the decision may have been made on feel, and that is worth knowing before it gets repeated across every client.

If too many calls are still routing back to you, a short fit call is a good place to talk through where to start.

More from this week

This piece stands on its own. Here are this week's 3 pieces:

• Monday: If You Stepped Away for a Year, What Would Be Left to Sell?
• Tuesday: Losing the Room in the First Minute, and How to Keep It
• Wednesday: Your Managers Are Passing Your Decisions Along Without the Reasons (this post)

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