A friend and I were discussing his perception of the organization and how it had shifted since a change in leadership two years ago. He was frustrated to see that decision making was disappearing. The leadership team would take up the task to make decisions on a variety of projects while the team members would be waiting for these decisions to happen.

He was seeing problems on both sides. The leaders were not following up on the decisions fast enough and the team would not make themselves aware of the possibilities. Thus when decision deadlines would creep up, neither side would be prepared. Decisions eventually would happen when some of the more experienced team members would step in.

There might be many reasons for this shift and even more, approaches to react to such situations.

One way to look at it is to see that the shift of leadership created some social unrest in the organization. The members of the organization work to figure out how they can keep their habits, that is the way the organization has been working until now while adapting to the new leaders.

When there is unrest, there is also a tendency to avoid taking too much responsibility. It is like regressing to a more dependent state. For the members of the organization that’s to make sure that they don’t displease the new leaders. The leaders, on the other hand, might have similar hesitations as they are learning what type of leadership is accepted in the organization. This also means that both sides might have impacted the other through transference.

As everyone waits for something to happen, those involved might feel slightly helpless. In such a state they’ll easily hope for a magical solution. For someone who can fix the situation. For something that resolves it.

Until a fix appears, they will rationalize why there wasn’t enough time or information to make a decision.