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Computerworld - The best leaders take their lessons wherever they find them — whether in the hard knocks of experience, the generosity of mentors or the clear gaze of their employees. We asked CIOs of five major organizations to share their most important leadership lessons. Here’s what they told us.

The lesson: It’s important to push decisions down into the organization. Ninety percent of the time, people know what the right answer is, but they may not have the confidence — particularly when they’re junior-level — to make the call. Having decisions made lower in the organization provides a more powerful organization.

How I learned it: The “Aha!” moment for me was when I worked at a Big Five public accounting company. The emphasis there was on coming to the table with a whole body of work — the term was “completed staff work” — that was a result of your analysis. That included the situation, an examination of the likely alternatives and your recommended solution. Rather than stop halfway, you were expected to provide the client with the right decision.

When I first arrived at Regions, when something needed to be decided — say the timing of the rollout of a program — some people would come to me and say, “Here’s the analysis, and here are the alternatives.” And then they’d kind of look at me, waiting for the decision. To really leverage the power of the organization and of the people in it, you have to push the decision back to them.

How I pass it on to employees: I always ask what they would do, and I worked to get that philosophy instilled in the organization. Now, they feel unprepared if they haven’t thought through what they would do in a given situation. If I’m in a meeting with three or four people at different levels of the organization, I will often ask the most junior person in the room what option they think is best, and frequently I’ll go with that direction. It’s a matter of reinforcing to them that they usually have more information than me, and if they’ve done a good job thinking it through, then they’re in a good position to make the call. It demonstrates that I value not just their opinions but also their thought process and assertive decision-making. For the organization, it accelerates our speed to market and capacity, and it creates the environment that high performers want to work in.

The tag line I use is that it’s important to encourage people to lead themselves, and decision-making is one of the more salient parts of leadership. There may be places in the organization for people who want to be told what to do. But one of the traits I look for is decision-making and the ability to empower yourself. When you enable that energy and align it with your goals deep in the organization, you see sustainable, breakthrough levels of performance.