What a CEO or board can ask when decisions keep returning to the top, and what an advisor on organizational risk finds when she traces them back.
When decisions keep returning to the top of a company, Dr. Nore Salman says, leaders often ask, “Why won’t they take ownership?” She would ask, “What are they actually authorized to own?”
Slow decisions have a price. A 2019 McKinsey Quarterly article reported a survey of more than 1,200 managers at global companies in which 61 percent said at least half the time spent making decisions was ineffective. Nore starts earlier than that lost time, with what the organization has asked of the people involved.
Nore advises CEOs and boards on organizational risk and Decision Governance, particularly when growth, restructuring, transition, or complexity exposes weaknesses in how authority, accountability, information, and execution are designed. She is the founder of The Heart Centered Leadership Institute and an executive and board organizational advisor.
What Delegation Leaves Out
Nore treats delegation and Decision Governance as two different things. “Delegation is not the same as Decision Governance,” she says. Telling someone they are empowered, she says, means very little if that authority disappears the first time they make a decision the CEO would not have made.
“Decision Governance is the organizational design of who has authority to make which decisions, where that authority ends, when consultation or escalation is required, and how accountability follows the decision.”
Dr. Nore Salman, Executive & Board Organizational Advisor, The Heart Centered Leadership Institute
For Nore, the test comes at a specific moment: when someone uses that authority differently than the CEO would have. If the CEO immediately takes the decision back, she says, the organization learns that permission was conditional. People begin escalating again because escalation has become the safer behavior. That is one instance of a wider claim she makes about behavior inside organizations.
Starting From the Behavior
“Organizations teach people how to behave,” Nore says. If decisions repeatedly require senior approval, people learn to escalate. If incentives reward individual performance while leadership asks for collaboration, people learn to protect their own outcomes. If information becomes less candid as it moves upward, executives make decisions from an increasingly distorted version of organizational reality.
Leadership then names what it sees: lack of ownership, resistance, poor accountability, weak leadership. Nore says behavior is often the final output of a much longer chain, so she works backward from it. She asks what decision rights, incentives, information flows, accountability mechanisms and leadership responses would make the behavior rational. “Behavior is evidence,” she says. “My work is to determine what organizational conditions are producing it.”
She has described one of those conversations in a post on LinkedIn. A founder told her his managers were resisting a multimillion-dollar expansion. On a Zoom call, she asked what would happen to their bonuses if they helped him deliver it. The expansion needed experienced people from their existing teams, and their bonuses still depended on hitting current targets. “So we’re asking them to take the hit?” the founder asked after a pause. Nore wrote that she developed the organizational design that realigned targets, incentives and resource authority, with the COO leading implementation. The founder had approved the expansion, she wrote, and the organization was “still rewarding people for operating as though he hadn’t.” She applied the same tracing to a decision that kept landing on a CEO’s desk.
A Project Manager and the CEO’s Desk
In one organization she worked with, Nore says, a project manager was perceived as insufficiently decisive. Routine decisions kept reaching the CEO, slowing execution and consuming executive capacity. When she examined how decisions actually moved through the organization, the behavior made sense: the project manager did not have sufficiently clear boundaries within which authority could be exercised confidently. The redesign set explicit thresholds for what the project manager could decide independently, what required executive involvement, and what warranted board-level escalation.
“The behavioral change did not come from telling the project manager to become more accountable. It came from making authority usable and then allowing the person holding that authority to exercise it.”
Nore, Executive & Board Organizational Advisor, The Heart Centered Leadership Institute
She wrote about the same kind of redesign in a LinkedIn post on a growing company whose routine decisions kept returning to the CEO’s desk. Four decision thresholds were set: under $10K for the project manager, $10K to $50K for a VP or department head, $50K to $100K for the CEO, and above $100K for the board. “Setting the thresholds wasn’t the difficult part,” she wrote. “The harder part came when someone actually used the authority.” The CEO had told his team to stop asking him for permission, and then they made a decision he wouldn’t have made. He had to accept, she wrote, that “authority includes the possibility that someone will make a different decision than you would.” If he stepped back in every time he disagreed, the thresholds meant nothing.
Nore is careful about what work like this can be credited with.
What the Numbers Do and Don’t Show
In one PE-backed technology company, she says, headcount grew from approximately 116 to approximately 248 while turnover declined from roughly 50 percent to approximately 10 to 20 percent within twelve months. Revenue increased from approximately $3 million to approximately $11 million during the period.
She doesn’t credit one intervention. “Organizational outcomes are rarely produced by one lever,” she says. The work included clarifying decision authority, strengthening accountability, examining how leadership behavior affected execution, and building organizational infrastructure capable of supporting a rapidly growing company. She says she would be careful about attributing either the retention or the revenue result to one organizational intervention. What she can say is that the operating environment changed materially while the company scaled, and that the organization became substantially more capable of supporting that growth.
“For me, that is an important standard of evidence in organizational work: not simply whether people report that leadership feels better, but whether the organization becomes more capable of producing the outcomes the business requires.”
Nore, Executive & Board Organizational Advisor, The Heart Centered Leadership Institute
Her work with organizations began alongside her training.
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Doctoral Training and Early Advisory Work
Nore began advising leaders and organizations in 2010, alongside her doctoral training, through executive development, organizational development, behavioral assessment and leadership advisory work. She studied at the Illinois School of Professional Psychology, Chicago Campus, from 2010 to 2015 and holds a Doctor of Psychology (PsyD) in clinical psychology, with additional doctoral training and study in organizational and integrative psychology, behavioral science, group dynamics and organizational consultation. Her training included more than 5,000 hours of supervised applied work with clients, and her dissertation examined conformity and autonomy across individualistic and collectivistic cultural contexts. She founded The Heart Centered Leadership Institute in 2017 to address a recurring pattern: problems attributed to people, leadership or culture are often symptoms of the organizational systems producing them.
In a LinkedIn post she wrote that her father was a CEO who taught her three rules she had to unlearn: never show emotion, never show uncertainty, never choose a side. When leaders believe they must always appear certain, she wrote, they stop asking questions, and the people below them become more careful about what they say. “Eventually,” she wrote, “the person with the most decision authority can become the person receiving the least accurate information.” She calls that not only a personality problem but an information-flow and decision-governance problem, and it is the information problem she asks boards to look for.
A Question for the Next Board Meeting
Boards examine strategy, financial performance, capital allocation and risk, Nore says. What can receive far less scrutiny is the organizational system expected to turn those decisions into results. “A company can have a credible strategy and still lack the organizational capacity to execute it,” she says. She wants directors asking whether authority, accountability, incentives, information flow, leadership capacity and succession are actually designed for the strategy the board has approved.
The question she would put to management at the next meeting is: “Where does our strategy depend on authority, information, or capability concentrated in one person?” She says it can reveal decision bottlenecks, key-person dependency, succession risk, information concentration, and organizational capabilities that appear institutional but actually reside in individuals. She has written on key-person dependency for Forbes Coaches Council, in a September 2026 article titled “Your Company May Be Less Scalable Than Your Financials Suggest.” Those questions frame the advisory work she is focused on now.
Where Nore Is Now
Nore’s primary direction is executive and board advisory work, particularly where organizational risk, Decision Governance and organizational design affect execution, growth and continuity. Through The Heart Centered Leadership Institute (THCLI), she advises CEOs, founders, boards and executive teams on organizational risk, Decision Governance, organizational design, succession and execution during periods of growth, restructuring and transition.
THCLI’s Executive Organizational Risk Assessment™ is its diagnostic for examining seven areas of organizational risk: Leadership Alignment, Decision Architecture, Accountability, Incentives, Information Flow, Trust Systems and Execution Reliability. She wants this view to reach senior executives and board members.
Of the project manager’s case, she says: “You cannot ask people to act like owners while designing an organization that continually teaches them to ask permission.”
Five Reflections from Nore
What are they actually authorized to own? Delegation is not the same as Decision Governance.
What would make this behavior rational? Behavior is evidence.
What happens when someone uses that authority differently than the CEO would have? If the CEO immediately takes the decision back, the organization learns that permission was conditional.
Where does our strategy depend on authority, information, or capability concentrated in one person? Indispensability can look like strength until the organization needs to operate without the indispensable person.
What do we know privately that this decision does not yet reflect? A deadline described privately as impossible may still appear green in the board update.
From the Diary of Dr. Nore Salman
Dr. Nore Salman is a San Francisco Bay Area-based executive and board organizational advisor and the founder of The Heart Centered Leadership Institute.
| Role | Executive & Board Organizational Advisor | Fractional CPO | Human Behavior & Organizational Strategy |
| Based in | San Francisco Bay Area |
| Also with | Forbes Coaches Council |
“Behavior is evidence. My work is to determine what organizational conditions are producing it.”
Editor’s Note
Executives Diary features Dr. Nore Salman because she makes a specific argument and puts a record behind it. She argues that the behavior leadership names as the problem is often the output of how authority, incentives and information are designed, and she shows the working in a project manager’s case, a founder’s expansion and a PE-backed technology company’s numbers. She is also exact about what the evidence supports, declining to credit one intervention for the retention and revenue results. For the senior executives and board members the piece is written for, it offers a question to take into the next meeting.
Executives Diary, Editorial
