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Decision rights

How to ask your boss for the decisions you should own

Most newly promoted leaders wait to be handed the strategic part of the role. It rarely arrives that way.

Bill Dickinson Bill Dickinson, D.Min., RCC 6 min read
How to ask your boss for the decisions you should own

Most newly promoted leaders wait to be handed the strategic part of the role. They wait for the scope to arrive, for the invitation to the room, for a sponsor to say the words out loud. It rarely arrives that way. Permission is something you take, in the open, with your boss in the room.

Why the hovering happens

The pull back into the weeds rarely comes from one place. In my experience it comes from three at once.

Your boss, who held your job before you and finds hovering over familiar concerns more comfortable than facing their own learning curve.The culture, where delegating too much reads as aloof, or as acting like a consultant rather than a teammate.Your own habits, still keeping the calendar, the information flow and the ownership of a role you no longer hold.

None of the three gets solved by working harder. All three get quieter the moment the boundary is explicit, because an unspoken boundary is exactly where hovering lives.

The ask itself

One newly promoted VP reset the dynamic with his SVP in a single conversation. This is close to what he said, and I have watched several leaders use a version of it since.

The ask, close to verbatimAs I step more fully into this role, I want to ensure I am creating leverage for you, not dependency. To do that, I would like to align on decision rights. Here are the ones I believe I should own, the ones I will keep you informed on, and the rare situations I will escalate to you. Does this look right, or would you shift anything?

Look at what that does. It is co-creative rather than a demand. It assumes positive intent, so your boss is not being accused of micromanaging. It frames your independence as a benefit to them, which it is. And it signals readiness more clearly than any answer you could give in a performance review.

How to prepare for twenty minutes

Write three lists before the meeting. What you own outright, what you will keep them informed on, what you escalate. Keep the whole thing to one page.Populate each list with real decisions from the last quarter, not categories. Named decisions are hard to argue with and easy to agree to.Put two or three items in the escalate column on purpose. A list with nothing escalated reads as overreach.Close by asking what would have to be true to move one item from the informed column into the owned column. That turns the conversation into a development plan.
They are deciding whether you can be trusted with ambiguity. There is no metric for that, so they read how you think.

Model the space rather than ask for it

Asking for strategic scope tends to produce a conversation about readiness. Demonstrating it produces a conversation about scope. So bring one enterprise level question to every forum you already sit in. What does this decision cost the function next to ours. What happens to this number in the second year. Which of our three priorities does this actually serve.

You are not performing. You are showing the room how you think, which is the thing they are quietly assessing anyway.

What changes afterwards

Two things, and they arrive quickly. Your boss stops hovering, because the boundary is now explicit rather than implied and both of you agreed to it. And your team inherits the clarity, because you can finally tell them which decisions are theirs without checking upward first.

It costs twenty minutes. It resets what both of you expect. Quite frankly, it is the shortest path from potential to permission that I know of.

Four things to hold
01Hovering lives in unspoken boundaries. Make the boundary explicit and most of it stops.
02Bring three lists on one page: own, inform, escalate, built from real decisions.
03Put a few items in the escalate column on purpose. Nothing escalated reads as overreach.
04Ask what would have to be true to move one item into the owned column. Now it is a development plan.
Bill Dickinson Bill Dickinson, D.Min., RCC Founder and Managing Partner, C3 Leadership

Thirty-five years spent alongside leaders in hard moments, first as a pastor and now as an executive coach. Author of Optimizing Self, second edition, September 2026.

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