“What decisions can your team make without you?”
I asked this of an executive who had just spent twenty minutes describing a team he rated highly. Experienced, capable, close to the work.
He paused for a long time.
That pause told us more than any answer could. For all his confidence in them, most significant decisions still found their way back to him.
This is a composite example, drawn from patterns I see repeatedly across coaching engagements.
One of the harder transitions in senior leadership is recognising when the capability that built your career starts to limit the organisation around you. You know the business. Your judgement is trusted. You usually reach the answer faster. So people bring you more decisions, and because you can help, you do.
Over time, being useful quietly becomes being necessary.
At executive level, delegation is less about time management than about where judgement sits in the organisation, how much authority others genuinely hold, and whether the team keeps moving when you are not in the room. Elsbeth Johnson of MIT Sloan argues, drawing on her research and practice, that even experienced leaders often remain stuck in the detail of their teams’ work, and that their organisations pay a real price for it.
How the pattern forms
It is rarely dramatic. You delegate the project but still approve every important step. You tell someone they own the decision, then revisit it when their judgement differs from yours. You ask for initiative, yet the team has learned that checking with you first is safer than moving ahead.
The organisation adapts. People wait. Decisions travel upward. You become busier while the team becomes less confident operating without you.
McKinsey’s work on delegated decision-making describes the same dynamic. When roles are unclear, decisions end up back on the senior leader’s desk or stall. When leaders repeatedly overrule decisions they would have made differently, people gradually stop owning outcomes and senior time fills up.
The trap on the other side
The obvious remedy is to step back. A separate McKinsey analysis points to another trap: leaders who delegate and then disengage. McKinsey calls this the “cheerleader” pattern.
When senior leaders disappear too far from the decision, the people they intended to empower can lose access to the judgement, challenge and development that senior engagement provides.
McKinsey describes the more effective archetype as the coach: involved but not directive, providing guidance and guardrails, holding people accountable and leaving the decision with them.
Effective delegation still requires leadership presence.
The questions I would explore
Rather than asking a leader to “delegate more”, I might ask:
- What genuinely requires your judgement?
- Which decisions do you keep because of risk, and which because of habit?
- Where have you handed over responsibility without enough authority?
- What would your team need from you to make a sound decision without asking permission?
- What do you get from being the person everyone comes back to?
That last question often opens a different conversation.
Holding on is not always about control. Sometimes it is about identity.
Many senior leaders built their reputation as the person who knows, fixes, decides and delivers. Letting go asks them to find their value somewhere else: in clarity of direction, quality of judgement, boundaries and accountability.
Knowing which decisions to keep
Some calls belong with the executive. The discipline lies in knowing which ones.
McKinsey offers a practical test. List your top twenty regularly occurring decisions and ask of each:
- Is it reversible?
- Could one of my direct reports make it?
- Could I hold that person accountable?
If the answer to all three is yes, delegate it.
Be explicit about when a decision is fully delegated and when you want input but retain the final say. Set clear thresholds for escalation. And when a delegated decision goes wrong, resist taking control back immediately. Hold the person accountable and coach them through it.
In practice, this may mean agreeing guardrails, defining what a good decision looks like before it is made, and being clear about when escalation is warranted.
Perhaps most demanding of all, it means allowing someone to make a sound decision differently from the way you would have made it.
If every delegated decision still needs to look like yours, very little authority has moved.
As leaders become more senior, their impact depends increasingly on what happens without their direct involvement. The organisation should benefit from their judgement without needing their presence in every decision.
A more useful question might be:
What still needs you that should no longer need you?