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My go-to leadership tactic backfired during a quarterly review in Chicago
I was in a boardroom at our Chicago office, a month after rolling out this new delegation framework I was really proud of. The idea was to push more decisions down to the team leads, so I could focus on bigger strategy. But during the Q3 numbers review, my CFO pulled me aside and said our margins dropped 12% because one team lead approved a vendor contract without cross-checking costs. I had to stand up in front of 40 people and admit I pushed too much authority without setting clear guardrails. Instead of blaming the lead, I walked through exactly where I messed up on the process. We fixed it by creating a simple approval threshold chart they all had to follow. Has anyone else found that letting go of control too fast actually hurts more than it helps?
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tylerr291mo ago
But honestly, I think the problem wasn't letting go too fast, it was skipping the training and safety nets that go with it. You gave them freedom without teaching them where the cliffs were, and that setup was bound to fail from the start. A threshold chart is good, but a better move would have been to run a few trial rounds together before fully stepping back.
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