When the Decision Is Not Yours, but the Team Is

There is a part of leadership I find harder than making a difficult decision myself. It is carrying a difficult decision that somebody else made into a team that trusts me.

Years ago, I ran my own SEO agency in Sweden. At one point, around thirty-eight people worked in the company. That responsibility was demanding. There were people to support, problems to solve, expectations to manage and decisions that could affect many people at once.

But I loved something about it. I loved watching people grow.

There is a particular satisfaction in watching someone become proud of something they once doubted they could do. Seeing someone understand more, take greater responsibility and eventually stop needing the support they needed when they started has always meant more to me than simply seeing a task completed.

When it was my company, the responsibility was heavy, but there was also clarity. The final responsibility was mine.

Today, as a team lead, leadership feels different. I still have people depending on me. I still need to give direction, protect standards, develop people, solve problems and make sure that our work moves forward. But there is someone above me. That means there are decisions I make and decisions I carry. I have learned that the second kind can be much harder.

When people know how you lead

Over time, a team learns its leader. Not just through what the leader says, but through repetition.

People learn what happens when something goes wrong. They learn whether they can disagree. They learn whether asking for help will be interpreted as weakness. They learn whether a mistake leads to a conversation or a performance of authority. They learn whether freedom is genuine or only available until they make a decision differently from how the leader would have made it.

I give people a lot of freedom. But I do not think freedom means the absence of responsibility. Quite the opposite. I want people to own their work.

If I give somebody an important task, I explain why it matters, what we need to achieve and what consequences surround it. Then, if I trust that person and they have demonstrated that they understand their responsibility, I do not need to stand over them saying: Do this now. Do that next. Have you started? Why are you doing it like that?

I do not need to constantly demonstrate that I am the person with authority. I already know what my role is. More importantly, the team knows it too.

I want people to have enough space to show me what they are capable of. Sometimes that means they will find a better solution than mine. That is not a threat to my leadership. That is evidence that something is working.

Everyone has a first time

I remember being involved in recruiting someone who, on paper and during the process, had several weaknesses.

His command of the working language was not particularly strong. His understanding of the tasks was limited. He did not yet understand much of the practical side of SEO in iGaming.

These concerns were raised during recruitment. The conclusion from others was understandable: we probably should not hire him.

I disagreed. Not because I believed the concerns were wrong. They were accurate. I could see exactly what he did not know.

But I kept returning to something simple: Everyone has a first time.

Every person who is experienced today once entered a room without that experience. Every specialist once needed someone to explain the obvious. Every person who confidently owns a strategy today once looked at the same kind of work without knowing where to begin.

I told them that I had the time and the energy to teach him. More than that, I believed he would succeed.

I cannot fully explain why. Sometimes you see something in a person before they have enough experience to demonstrate it clearly.

So we hired him on a six-month probation. And I quickly discovered that teaching him would require even more work than I had expected.

At the beginning, we could have two or three video meetings a day, five days a week. I showed him things step by step. Then I showed him again.

We went through how to analyse something, how to connect different pieces of information, how to create strategies and, most importantly, how to think about the work rather than simply follow instructions.

There is an important difference between teaching somebody what to do and teaching somebody how to think about what they are doing. The first can get a task completed. The second can eventually create independence.

For months, I invested heavily in the second. Then something began changing. The meetings became less necessary. Two or three meetings a day became fewer.

After around four months, we were down to a normal weekly one-to-one.

When his six-month probation ended and HR asked me to evaluate him, I had good things to say. He had succeeded. He owned the strategy for his brands. He owned the work.

I could ask him to analyse something because I wanted to know whether changing part of our strategy could help us reach a particular goal, and he could take that question away and return with an analysis.

He was still learning, of course. Sometimes I would tell him: Next time, approach this part differently. It will be faster and it will give me more useful information.

But I did not need to take the task back from him. He learned.

After seven or eight months, I was no longer worried. He was free. Not free from responsibility. Free because he had learned how to carry it.

We no longer needed a scheduled one-to-one simply to make sure the work was moving. He knew what he owned. I trusted him with it.

For me, that is one of the most rewarding things leadership can produce. Not somebody becoming dependent on me. Somebody gradually needing me less.

Freedom still needs boundaries

There is a version of this philosophy that can easily become too comfortable.

A leader says: “I trust my team.” Then deadlines are missed, communication disappears and the same mistakes happen repeatedly.

That is not the kind of freedom I mean. Trust does not remove standards. My boundaries are quite clear.

Missed deadlines matter to me. A deadline rarely exists alone. When one important task is delayed, it can affect the next task, another person, another department or another commitment.

One missed deadline can create a chain of missed deadlines.

Communication matters too. If I give someone responsibility for something and then hear nothing, I should not need to guess whether the work has started, where it sits in the process or whether there is a problem.

Independence should reduce unnecessary communication. It should not remove necessary communication.

And repeated mistakes are another boundary. When somebody makes a mistake for the second time after we have already discussed it, I step in.

But even then, I try not to begin by accusing them. I ask questions. What information did you receive from me? What did I explain? How did you understand the task?

I want to know whether the failure began with them or with me.

Perhaps I believed I had communicated something clearly when I had not. Perhaps they interpreted my instruction differently. Perhaps an important detail never reached them.

Only when I know they understood the original expectation can I reasonably ask the harder question: If you understood what needed to change after the first time, why did the same mistake happen again?

Freedom with responsibility requires both words. Without freedom, people can stop using their own judgement. Without responsibility, the team cannot rely on that freedom.

Then there are decisions I cannot protect them from

This is where being a team lead becomes different from running my own company.

I can build trust. I can help people grow. I can create freedom around responsibility. I can learn how each person works and gradually build a team where the work moves almost naturally between us.

And then something can happen outside that team. A company restructures. Priorities change. Responsibilities move. Processes change. Sometimes positions disappear.

Recently, restructuring meant that two people from my team had to leave.

The hardest part was not telling them.

The hardest part came before that. It was knowing.

Knowing what was going to happen while still working with people normally. Knowing that somebody I genuinely enjoyed working with would soon receive information that could change their life. And knowing that I could not fix it.

There are many problems in leadership where effort helps.

If somebody lacks knowledge, I can teach. If our process is inefficient, we can rebuild it. If someone misunderstands a priority, I can clarify it. If a person is struggling, I can sit down with them and understand why.

Those problems give me somewhere to put my energy. A decision that has already been made above me can leave me with nowhere to put it.

That is difficult for me. Because my instinct when somebody in my team has a problem is to look for what I can do.

Sometimes the honest answer is: Nothing that will change this decision.

I will argue before I carry it

That does not mean I quietly accept every decision from above.

When I believe there is a real reason to disagree, I say so. Privately.

I explain why I see the situation differently. I argue my position. I try to show the consequences I believe the decision may create.

And where possible, I look for somewhere in the middle.

Could we achieve what the company needs without creating this particular problem? Could we change part of the decision? Could we approach it differently? Could something I know about the team change how the situation is understood?

I think that is part of my responsibility too. The people above me do not have the same relationship with every person in my team that I have.

They may have information I do not have. But I also have information they do not have.

Leadership upwards matters as much as leadership downwards. I should not agree simply because somebody higher in the organisation has spoken. If I have relevant information, I should use it.

But there is another point that eventually arrives. The decision is made. Then I have to understand what responsibility looks like after disagreement has ended.

I will not pretend the decision was mine

Sometimes my team notices immediately.

They know me. They know how we normally work. They recognise when a new direction does not sound like something I would normally introduce.

And sometimes they ask. In those moments, I do not believe I need to pretend.

I can tell them: This was not my decision. But it is the decision that has been made, and it is what we have to work with.

There is another part I think matters. We work for a company. The company has to make decisions for what it believes is best for the company as a whole.

My team is enormously important to me, but my responsibility cannot stop at the border of my own team.

Sometimes something that is uncomfortable for us may still be necessary for a larger reason.

Sometimes I may disagree with how something is done while understanding why something needs to change. And sometimes I may continue to think another solution would have been better. I can hold those things at the same time.

What I do not want to do is stand in front of my team and pretend enthusiasm for something they can clearly see does not sound like me.

Nor do I want to undermine the company by turning every disagreement into: I agree with you, but management made us do it.

That may protect my popularity with the team. It does not demonstrate much leadership.

There is a difference between honesty and avoiding responsibility. I can tell people where a decision came from while still accepting my responsibility to implement what has been decided.

Protecting people with responsibility

When I think about what I owe the people I lead, I keep returning to a phrase:

I want to protect them with responsibility.

Protection alone can become dangerous.

If I tried to shield my team from every uncomfortable decision, every consequence and every difficult conversation, I would not really be protecting them. I would be creating an artificial world that eventually collides with the real one.

We work inside a company. There are commercial realities. There are expectations. There are changes we cannot control. There are decisions that will disappoint people.

My job is not to make those realities disappear. But neither do I believe my responsibility ends when I forward the message.

If I believe a decision is genuinely wrong and may unnecessarily hurt someone, I will try to fight for them before it is final.

If the decision cannot be changed, I will explain what I can explain. I will not disappear because their disappointment makes me uncomfortable. I will stay emotionally present.

And if somebody has to leave, I do not believe the relationship needs to stop at the same moment their employment does.

I can check on them afterwards. I can help them where I reasonably can. I can recommend them when I genuinely believe in their work. I can remain a human being after the organisational relationship has ended.

Maybe that sounds obvious. I do not think it always is.

Companies have processes for departures. Human relationships do not always fit inside those processes.

The hardest leadership can happen when you have the least power

When I owned my company, I carried the responsibility for difficult decisions.

But at least the decision eventually came back to me.

I could change it. I could accept another consequence. I could choose another direction.

Leading from the middle has taught me another kind of responsibility.

Sometimes I have to stand in front of somebody who trusts me while knowing I cannot give them the answer they want.

Sometimes I have already argued the case before they even knew there was a disagreement. Sometimes I have to implement something I would have designed differently.

And sometimes I have to watch somebody leave while knowing that their departure does not reflect what I thought of them.

I have limited authority over the outcome in those moments. But there is still leadership.

I can decide whether I hide. I can decide whether I blame. I can decide whether I pretend.

I can decide whether I remain available when the conversation becomes uncomfortable.

I can decide whether I treat somebody as a position in an organisational structure or as a person whose work, development and trust mattered to me.

That part is still mine.

I don’t need to show my power

The more experience I gain in leadership, the less interested I am in looking like a leader.

I do not need people to constantly feel my authority. I want them to feel clarity.

I want them to know what they own. I want them to understand when something is urgent and when they have space to decide.

I want someone who starts uncertain to eventually become capable of telling me something I have not considered. I want people to become proud of themselves.

And when somebody no longer needs me to tell them how to do their job, I do not see my importance disappearing. I see something we built working.

There will still be moments when I need to step in.

There will still be missed deadlines, poor communication, mistakes, disagreements and decisions that nobody enjoys.

There will also be decisions that come from somewhere above me. I cannot control all of them.

I can argue when I believe I should. I can explain what I know. I can tell the truth about what belongs to me and what does not.

And once the decision reaches the people I lead, I can decide what kind of leader carries it into the room.

That may be the part I control most.

Not whether every decision is mine. Not whether every person gets to stay. Not whether the organisation always moves in the direction I would personally choose.

But whether the people who trusted me still recognise me when something difficult arrives.

I want them to know that I will give them freedom when they can carry it.

I will step in when responsibility requires it. I will argue for them when I believe there is something worth arguing for.

I will be honest when the final decision is no longer mine.

And if circumstances eventually take someone out of my team, I will not suddenly act as though the person disappeared with the position.

Because leadership, at least as I understand it, was never really about showing people that I had power over them.

It was about what I chose to do with the responsibility they trusted me to carry.