You Hired Executors and Then Asked Them to Decide

The people at the top made most of the decisions for a good reason. They had the most tenure, the most context, and often the most skill. They knew what to do, could tell you how to do it, and knew who to hire to get it done. That model built a lot of organizations up to the size they are now.

To keep growing, and to develop the next generation of leaders, that model has to invert. The people who used to make the majority of the decisions have to delegate that authority to the people closest to the action, the ones who need to decide in the moment anyway. Which changes the leader's job in a specific way… it moves from making decisions to disseminating context. Your work becomes making sure everyone facing a day-to-day call has the information they need to make the best one available. That means giving up control, staying out of people's way, and genuinely trusting that the people you hired can do the job as well as you would, or better.

Here's the part that catches organizations off guard. If you hired executors, people who would do what they were told and do it reliably, they may not be the right people for the model you're moving toward. They weren't hired for autonomy, or agency, or decision-making, or for operating inside a high-trust environment where nobody is going to tell them the answer. That makes this the right moment to ask a harder question than the one about delegation: do you have the right people in the right seats for where this is going? When the answer is yes, pushing decisions to the edge does more than speed up how work gets done. It produces an organization where everyone thinks and acts like a leader.

0:00 The need to push decision-making to the edge

0:18 How traditional hierarchical decisions worked

0:40 Why the model needs to invert for growth

1:01 Shifting from decisions to context dissemination

1:14 Requirements for successful delegation

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