It’s funny how “restructuring” and “reorganizing” always sound like new ideas, when really they’re just fresh names for the same instinct: redraw the boxes, and the problems will follow suit.
Alongside that instinct sit two more beliefs most leaders hold without questioning them. The bigger and more expensive the decision, the more it belongs at the top — that’s just how it worked when the company was small, and it got the company this far. And the safest way to keep everyone aligned is consensus. Get the whole room to agree, and nobody feels left out.
All three feel right for real reasons. Rearranging teams gives everyone a genuine hit of purpose — moving boxes on an org chart feels like solving something important, even when it isn’t. Pushing big decisions upward feels fair, because senior leaders supposedly carry the wisdom and risk tolerance the rest of the organization hasn’t earned yet. And consensus feels peaceful. Nobody wants to be the person who blocked the room from agreeing.
Here’s where all three quietly fall apart.
A senior executive in charge of a two-billion-dollar budget once got pulled into choosing the paint color for a meeting room wall. The committee below him was too afraid to make that tiny call on their own.
A firm with two co-founders, neither willing to cede final say to the other, forced every decision through double approval. That meant two bottlenecks instead of one.
A global charity built regional “centers of excellence” specifically to speed things up. Instead, it created new logjams, because nobody had actually clarified who got the final call inside them.
At Digital Equipment Corporation, the CEO once asked his leadership team to reach consensus on three competing strategies. They couldn’t agree, had no rule for breaking the tie, and settled on a mission statement so generic it meant nothing at all.
Meanwhile, middle managers everywhere quietly filter out anything messy or complicated before it reaches the top. Senior leaders end up approving decisions based on numbers someone else has already smoothed over.
I heard about a senior executive recently who presented outright fudged data to get a high-stakes project approved. It worked, for about six months, until it didn’t. By the time anyone found out, the damage was already done.
The common thread across every one of these is embarrassingly simple: nobody had actually mapped out who’s accountable for what, or what rules they’re supposed to use to decide. Restructuring feels like solving that. It almost never does, because moving boxes around an org chart was never the same question as who actually holds the final call.
Underneath all of it sits something people rarely say out loud. The ones holding decision-making power don’t want to give it up — it feeds something closer to identity than efficiency. The ones without it have often found it easier to avoid accountability altogether than fight for clarity.
Which leaves me with a question I don’t have a clean answer for: how do you actually have this conversation with someone who holds power they don’t need anymore, but can’t imagine letting go of?