Why Does Everything Require My Approval?

If you're the person in your organization who most things flow through before they can move forward, you probably already know it. You feel it in the length of your to-do list, the number of messages waiting for your response, the requests that pile up on the days when you're unavailable. What you may not have fully named yet is that this is a design problem, and you are the designer.

A 2024 survey found that 63% of CEOs at growing companies still approve most team decisions, costing them more than ten hours a week in time that could have been redirected to actual strategy, growth, or leadership. That's more than 500 hours a year. In most cases, the people escalating those decisions are perfectly capable of making them. The escalation exists because the system, intentionally or not, was built to require it.

Howard Schultz built Starbucks into one of the most recognized brands in the world by being deeply, personally invested in nearly every dimension of the experience: the espresso standard, the store atmosphere, the culture of the baristas, the feeling of the brand. That personal investment was a meaningful part of what made Starbucks work in its early years. It was also, ultimately, part of what made the company fragile.

When Schultz stepped down as CEO in 2000, the organization he left behind was one that had been shaped by his judgment in almost everything that mattered. Without that judgment at the center, the company drifted. Standards slipped. The identity blurred. By 2008, the company was in serious trouble and had to call him back to stabilize it. He returned, fixed what had unraveled, and built something stronger the second time. But the fact that it required his return at all is important to note: a company that can only hold its standards when its founder is personally present has built a dependency.

This is the starting diagnosis inside Build a System That Survives You, the seventh principle of the BrandTruth Alignment™ System. The question it asks isn't whether your judgment is good, which it probably is. It's whether your judgment is documented, distributed, and built into a structure capable of operating without you in the room. These are very different things.

If you want a quick test, ask yourself: if you were unavailable for thirty days with no contact, which decisions would stall, which problems would quietly grow, and which standards would quietly slip? The answer is a map of your organization's dependency on you. Every item on that list is something the system currently cannot do without your specific involvement. Each one is also a decision you haven't yet successfully transferred.

The goal is not to make yourself unnecessary. It's to make your judgment systematic enough that your absence doesn't create a gap. That requires documenting not just what gets decided, but how. The criteria, the thresholds, the values that govern a decision when no one is looking.

Building the decision architecture that lets your organization operate at full capacity with or without you in the room is exactly the work we help founders and leadership teams do at Leadership In Focus.

Reach out to us at contact@leadershipinfocus.ca to talk through what that could look like for your organization.