Your Peak of the Week
Hey Reader,
Welcome back to Peak of the Week — where we talk about what it really takes to perform at your best. As a person. As a leader. And increasingly, as an organization.
This Week →
- The difference between being responsible for something and actually owning it
- What happens to your best people when they’re accountable but not empowered
- Why the decisions piling up on your desk aren’t a capacity problem
Read Time 4-5 minutes
She Had The Answer The Whole Time
I was sitting with a senior leader two weeks ago. She’s smart and experienced, the kind of person her organization absolutely cannot afford to lose, and we were talking through a decision her team had been circling for months.
I asked her what she thought the right call was.
She knew immediately. Didn’t even pause. Laid out the situation, the tradeoffs, the downstream implications….clearly, confidently, completely. It was one of the sharpest pieces of analysis I’d heard in a long time.
And then I asked her why the decision hadn’t been made. She got quiet for a second.
“I don’t actually know if it’s my decision to make.”
Four months. The decision had been sitting there for four months. She knew the answer. She was just waiting for someone to tell her she had permission to act on it.
So she waited.
The Cost of Waiting
I’d like to tell you that this situation is rare. It’s not.
In 30,000 recruiting conversations over the past two decades, I spoke with people who were exhausted by the drain of being responsible for outcomes they couldn’t control. Of carrying accountability for something they didn’t have the clear authority to move.
Ownership without authority is just liability.
Read that again.
You can hand someone a role, a title, a set of objectives, a performance review tied to results, and if they’re not clear on which decisions are actually theirs to make, you haven’t given them ownership. You’ve given them exposure.
Smart people feel that distinction immediately. They might not have language for it. They might call it micromanagement or unclear expectations or “the way things work around here.” But what they’re describing, every time, is the same thing.
I’m accountable for this outcome. And I’m not sure if I’m allowed to make the call that gets us there.
What They Do Instead
So they wait.
Or they bring everything upward… because they've learned that acting without explicit clearance carries risk. They've watched what happened when someone else moved fast and got it wrong. They've been in the debrief where the decision got second-guessed after the fact. They've absorbed, through experience, that the cost of getting it wrong is higher than the cost of waiting for approval.
So they wait.
And if you're the leader above them… then your day is filled with fielding decisions that should never reach you. Your calendar fills with questions that are really just requests for permission. Meetings that exist because nobody is sure who owns the call. Initiatives that stall at the threshold between "we've figured this out" and "we need to get sign-off."
You're not a bottleneck because you're a controlling leader.
You're a bottleneck because authority was never clearly designed.
And here's what I'm so convicted in after getting inside organizations and seeing this up close…. that ambiguity doesn't stay contained. It spreads. And spreads. And spreads.
When people don't know what's theirs to decide, they stop deciding anything. Initiative narrows. Execution becomes cautious and reversible. The very people you hired for their judgment start waiting for direction instead of using it.
The environment trained them that using their capability without permission was risky.
The Version Of This I Lived
I know exactly that aching feeling because I’ve been in it myself.
There were years in my career where I was generating real results, carrying real responsibility, and yet constantly doing this internal calculation before every significant move.
Is this mine to do? Will I be supported if this goes sideways? Or will I be out on a limb alone?
That calculation is exhausting. It runs underneath everything. And it is the opposite of the state you need to be in to do your best work.
Your best work requires a particular kind of freedom… the freedom to act on your judgment without the constant low-grade anxiety of not knowing if you’re allowed.
When that freedom exists, something opens up. Decisions get made. Work moves. People stop bringing you everything and start bringing you only what genuinely requires your judgment.
When it doesn’t…. you get the waiting. The escalation. The four-month-old decision sitting in someone’s hands because nobody told her it was hers to make.
What Authority Requires
It’s not a one-time conversation, and everything is fixed.
Authority requires three things working together.
People need to know which decisions are actually theirs… specifically, not generally. “You own the client relationship” is not the same as “you can decide X, you escalate Y, and here’s where the boundary is.” Vague ownership produces vague action.
They need to understand how decisions are meant to be made… what matters most when priorities conflict, what the organization values when tradeoffs come up. Without that context, even confident people hesitate. Because they don’t know if their judgment is calibrated to the right things.
And they need to feel that trust holds under pressure. That when they make the call and it doesn’t go perfectly (or maybe even sideways) that the response is a conversation rather than a consequence. The moment trust breaks under pressure is the moment people stop acting with authority, even when they technically have it.
Design all three, and something shifts in how a team moves.
Miss any one of them, and you’re back to the waiting. The escalation. The four-month-old decision. The senior leader who had the answer the whole time and never felt like she could use it.
Now It's Your Turn:
Question #1: Think about the types of decisions that always filter up to you, or become stalled in your organization. Are they actually complex? Or is it that nobody is clear on who has the authority to move it?
Question #2: Pick someone on your team who you'd describe as talented but hesitant. Before you diagnose their confidence or their capability, ask yourself what the environment has taught them about the cost of getting a decision wrong.
Be honest, because hesitation isn’t always a people problem.
Sometimes it’s a receipt. Evidence of every moment the environment signaled that acting without permission was a risk not worth taking.
Know a leader who keeps wondering why everything lands back on their desk? Forward this their way. The answer is almost never “hire better people”. It’s almost always “design clearer authority.”
When we know better, we do better.
Does this resonate for you today? Reply back and let me know, I reply to every email.
Because I care. I care a lot. And we can actually shift this!
Next week: what happens when people don't know what “excellent” actually looks like? And why unclear standards are one of the quietest, most demoralizing things you can do to a high performer.
With belief in our collective rise, one person at a time,
Laura
P.S. — If your team is full of capable people who keep bringing decisions upward, I'd love to talk about what's driving that. book time here.
P.P.S. — Check out my latest podcast appearance on Reclaiming Your Hue with Kelly Kirk, where we have an honest conversation about what it really costs high-achieving women to "hold it all together". If you're looking for more support, I'd love to talk - book an Activation Session