But you also need to occasionally stop and reevaluate your meetings and communications processes and change things up when they’re no longer an effective or efficient use of time. You might turn some meetings into status update reports and reduce the number of people who attend. But then you have to be wary of too many reports—you don’t want the teams spending tons of time releasing information that nobody reads. It’s a constant battle. Managers should always be paying attention to how many hours teams are sitting in meetings—both intra-team and inter-team—and working to keep those numbers under control.

The oversight group had been put in place without anyone asking a fundamental question: How do we enable our people to solve problems? Instead, they asked: How do we prevent our people from screwing up? That approach never encourages a creative response. My rule of thumb is that any time we impose limits or procedures, we should ask how they will aid in enabling people to respond creatively. If the answer is that they won’t, then the proposals are ill suited to the task at hand.

Accountability: This belongs to the ONE person who has the “ability to count” — who is tracking the progress and giving voice (screaming loudly) when issues arise within a defined task, team, function, or division. It doesn’t mean he or she makes all the decisions (or even any decisions) — which is why people often talk about leaderless teams. However, someone must still be accountable. The rule: If more than one person is accountable, then no one is accountable, and that’s when things fall through the cracks.

Responsibility: This falls to anyone with the “ability to respond” proactively to support the team. It includes all the people who touch a particular process or issue.

Authority: This belongs to the person or team with the final decision-making power.

Short-term agenda, long-term agenda - the time frame doesn’t much matter if the organization is not operating smoothly enough. “One of the biggest contributions a leader can make, although it’s often underrated, is defining the operating mechanisms - the meetings, the information flows, and the decision-making process used to conduct day-to-day business,” says Dan Kerpelman, president of Kodak’s Health Imaging Group. Sometimes you need to be directive.

Not every bad decision is rushed, nor is every good one made slowly. It’s not that simple.

People mistake choosing for decisiveness and the decision-making process for waffling. Part of what makes slowing down and reasoning through a problem difficult is that, to the outside observer, it might look like inaction. But that inaction is a choice.