When the Executive Becomes the Bottleneck

At one company I worked for, every decision — no matter how small — had to pass through one person first. A team in the double digits, each juggling several projects at once, and none of it could move without that same signature.

Even people with a decade or more of experience in the work couldn't act on their own judgment. If they made a call without asking first, the pushback came fast — regardless of whether the call was right.

Why This Costs More Than Time

The real cost of this isn't the delay, though the delay is real enough on its own — one person simply can't hold the details of a dozen concurrent projects in their head at once. The real cost is what it does to the people underneath. When nobody is ever allowed to decide anything, nobody ever learns how. Decision-making is a muscle, and a team that's never had permission to use it eventually stops trying — not because they can't think, but because they've learned that what they think doesn't change the outcome.

What That Actually Looked Like

I saw what that looked like from the inside. In weekly meetings, a room full of people who each had a decade or more in the field, and not one of them ever proposed a solution. Not one of them ever pushed back. Nobody went to raise an issue with the project head alone — people went in groups, as if a single voice wasn't enough to be heard, or safe enough to risk being wrong alone.

That silence showed up everywhere else, too. Facing a client, the team wouldn't argue back even when the client was clearly in the wrong — because pushing back wasn't a decision they'd been trusted to make. Facing a contractor who missed deadlines or cut corners on site, the team could only ask nicely and hope, because holding anyone accountable required an approval that rarely came in time. And when budget questions needed an answer from the project head and never got one, it was the working-level accounting team and the project team who ended up in the same argument, year after year, over something neither of them actually had the authority to resolve.

Why It Keeps Happening

None of this is really about any one person being difficult. It's what happens structurally when decision-making rights don't scale with the number of things that need deciding. A team running several projects at once needs distributed judgment just to function — that's not a nice-to-have, it's basic operational math. When every decision funnels through one point regardless of size, that point becomes the ceiling on how much the whole team can actually get done — and everyone underneath it quietly stops trying to raise the ceiling themselves.

Giving People Room to Make Decisions

The instinct behind keeping tight control is often fear of mistakes. But controlling every decision to avoid mistakes creates a different problem — people stop exercising judgment, and the organization ends up dependent on one person just to keep functioning.

I learned the opposite approach early in my career. The executive I worked for pushed decisions onto me almost immediately, because I couldn't do my job effectively if everything still had to go through him. When I worried that getting something wrong might cost the company money, he told me plainly to learn from it and not make the same mistake twice.

Mistakes still mattered to him — but he also understood that I couldn't take responsibility for the work without being given enough room to make decisions. Over time, people get better at deciding precisely because they've actually been allowed to.

That's the difference between assigning someone work and giving them ownership. If someone is responsible for getting something done but has to come back for approval at every step, the responsibility has moved — but the bottleneck hasn't.

A team that never makes mistakes isn't really the goal. What matters is having people who can exercise judgment, solve problems, and keep the work moving without waiting on one person for every call. Otherwise, control hasn't reduced the risk. It's just concentrated all of it in one place.

Where I Come In Now

These days, I work in exactly this gap. A growing business often reaches a point where the owner or director is still the person everything comes back to — when suppliers or customers need an answer, when a project hits a problem, when operations need someone to make a decision, or when something has gone off track and needs to be fixed so the business can run smoothly again. Not because no one else is capable, but because no one else has been given enough ownership to move things forward.

The answer isn't simply for the executive to decide faster. Someone needs to take ownership of the day-to-day execution — coordinating the people involved, responding to suppliers and customers, following up on what has stalled, solving the problems that can be solved, and bringing the executive only the decisions that genuinely require their judgment.

That's the kind of work I've been doing for more than two decades: not replacing the executive's judgment, but making sure every part of a project or operation doesn't depend on it.

Because good project management shouldn't create another person the business depends on. It should help the work move forward without everything having to go through one person.