There’s a myth that as you get more senior, you get to make more autonomous decisions about what happens in your business – what strategies to pursue, tools to buy, markets to go after and so on. “I’m the Head of Marketing, so surely I decide all the marketing stuff!?”

In fact it’s the opposite – the more senior you get, the fewer autonomous decisions you make. Why? Because those decisions have a wider impact, so you need to consult more with others and bring others along with you. That doesn’t mean you don’t own decisions – you still need to lead on making the right choices and pushing changes through. But you don’t get to do that all on your own.

I’ve used the following framework to help me decide how to make different types of calls – hopefully you’ll find it useful. Whenever a new decision needs to be made, I try to classify it in to one of three categories:

1. Decisions I can make on my own. Using the example of marketing, there are certain things which have more or less zero impact outside your department. Things like “What subject should I put in this email header? What messaging should we use for this campaign? How should we set up Marketo to work more effectively? What ideas do we have for getting more people on the newsletter?”. I struggle to think of more! You might still choose to communicate what you’re doing for info – transparency is always preferable – but it’s optional and something you might do after the fact. I think, for a senior role, this is around 5-10% of the decisions you make.
2. Decisions that I make, but where I need to consult others. If something is a marketing problem, then you should make the call. However, this doesn’t mean you don’t need to consult your partners first – Sales, Product, Finance, HR, Technology (depending on what the question is of course). Most decisions you make will have upstream or downstream consequences – if I change our Marketing Automation tool, what will happen to the leads going to Sales? If I decide to target Belgium instead of Netherlands, how will that impact Sales figures? If I decide to position our product differently, how does that align with the Product roadmap? And so on. Crucially, this isn’t just about telling people what you’re doing – you should be consulting with those people to really understand the impact, then adjusting your thoughts accordingly. The trick is being clear upfront about the decision-making process – that yes, you’ll be deciding whether to switch to Marketo, Hubspot or Pardot, and you’ll be listening to everyone’s views on the subject. But ultimately you’ll carry the can for that decision, so it needs to be yours. I estimate around 70-80% of decisions are like this, depending on your role.
3. Decisions that I want to happen/influence, but aren’t mine to make. We all depend on each other to be successful – the success of a marketing department is wholly dependent on the activities of other teams. We can’t sell a product that doesn’t exist (well, you can, but you shouldn’t!). Sales teams close our pipeline. HR helps us build our team, and so on. And we’ll often need those teams to do things for us. But if it’s a Product, Sales, Finance or HR decision to make, then it’s not your call – and it’s important to recognise that. Your role is to try and influence that plan. Sometimes you’ll get your way and sometimes you won’t. If it’s the latter, you need to adjust your plans accordingly and still find a path to success – there will be reasons why option B was taken instead of option A, and you need to find a way to accommodate that decision. Around 10-15% of decisions are like this, in my experience.

Being clear at the start of a process on which of these you’ll take is really the difference between a decision that lands with an organisation (because you’ve taken their views into account) and a decision that never quite gets taken up and implemented. The real skill is balancing the consultative approach with the importance of actually making a decision and driving it through. Not easy, but it’s a far stronger approach than making calls on your own – and none of them ever being implemented.