Transfer a Recurring Decision

Los Angeles, a Saturday morning in August 2005. Paper everywhere. I had founded Rightsline five years earlier, the team was amazing, and that morning it hit me in the face that I was part of every decision. Finance, legal, sales, product, marketing: I had asked the team to deliver on all of it and never explicitly gave them the authority to make the calls. The shadow operating system was simple: this is a big decision, we should check with Russ.

I pulled out my notebook, and what I wrote down was not a delegation list. I wrote down how I was going to give authority: these decisions are yours, and we will track outcomes together. I called Steve Stebbins, my chief revenue officer, that Saturday to warn him. Monday morning we worked through every decision together: pricing and discounts, hiring and compensation, account assignments, and negotiating customer contracts. I could see the weight lift off him. An authority handoff needs that level of detail. Picture a sales leader approving standard renewals within an agreed price range: put the range, contract terms, and service commitments in writing, name who decides an exception, and review the results at an agreed interval. The boundary makes the transfer usable. That week I told the whole executive leadership team that I had given them enormous responsibility while quietly holding back the authority that should have gone with it. Authority is decision rights, not a title. Every time I stepped in to close a deal, I taught the team to bring the next problem back to me. It probably took months to get fully out of the way.

Years later I lived the same system from the other side. At Media Temple I was president and every line reported through me. The responsibility was mine. The authority wasn't. When things got hard, people went around me straight back to Demian Sellfors, the founder and CEO. Not disloyalty. They knew how the company actually worked. I asked for a meeting with Demian and John Carey, the CFO. I had not briefed John, Demian had no warning, and he felt ganged up on. Then John spoke up on his own: "Demian, things need to go back through Russ. We're asking Russ to deliver on this. If someone comes to you directly and Russ has asked them to do something, just send them back. Ask them, 'Have you spoken to Russ about this?'" That one redirect was the mechanism. Demian started sending people back, and the managers' muscle memory slowly changed with it.

One more way to be the bottleneck, and it is not one person. BlackBerry had two CEOs, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. In fiscal 2011 it still reported $19.9 billion in revenue, up 33%, and a record 52.3 million devices shipped. Strong results did not settle the platform question. Balsillie later described the disagreement to Freakonomics Radio: he wanted to build on BlackBerry's services business, while Lazaridis wanted to keep investing in hardware. He said they reached an impasse and took it to the board, which chose the hardware path. That is his account of how the disagreement closed, not proof of what caused the decline. The lesson is to tell a decision inside one leader's scope from a strategic choice that changes both. When a decision spans two leaders' responsibilities, who brings the facts together, who makes the final call, and when must it be made? Name the tiebreaker before the tie arrives.

The Hero Test on yourself, the Bottleneck Check, then two working days of the 48-Hour Decision Queue Audit. Sort the queue into keep, redirect, and authorize. Write an Authority Grant for the third group and name the tiebreaker for any shared decision in the Decision Rights Record. Test one handoff on real work and a relevant exception, and check the queue and the result after two weeks.

If you run the company, the decision is yours to hand off, and the handoff is public: put it in writing and tell everyone it affects. When a decision you handed off lands back on your desk, ask whether they have spoken to the owner, and send it back. If you sit where Steve sat, don't wait for your boss's Saturday: write down the decisions you keep carrying up that you could already make, and ask for them in plain words. If you hold the title without the authority, give the person whose habit has to change some warning, brief your ally before you walk in, and ask for one redirect, framed as the result you cannot deliver while decisions route around you. Those are the steps I skipped at Media Temple. If you are the one everyone waits for, start with the work that keeps calling you back. Capture what you know, give someone else the authority to act with the knowledge, access, and practice to use it, and test real work and a relevant exception without your routine intervention.

Giving authority is not a decision you make once on a Saturday. You keep making it every day until it sticks.