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PERSPECTIVE | 09.18.2016

Delegate the Expectation of Success

A senior leader at my one of my past  firms was given PM responsibility for a project and then delegated the position to a project architect to run it day to day instead. On paper, the project architect was the project manager. In practice, the senior leader kept talking directly to the client and giving direction straight to the team. The intent was not to undermine anyone. He knew the client, saw problems developing, and believed he was protecting the project while mentoring someone less experienced. That is a normal instinct for an experienced leader.

The effect was not the intent. The project architect was being told to manage the project while watching the client relationship and team direction remain with someone else, and there was never a clear point where their authority began or ended. The architectural fee ran roughly twenty percent over, the schedule slipped, and the quality suffered. There were other factors, as there almost always are on a struggling project, but the ambiguity over who was actually leading it was clearly one of them.

When we looked at what had gone wrong, it was easy to point toward the person who had supposedly been running the project. They had been given the responsibility. But we had expected accountability from someone without ever fully establishing whether they had the authority necessary to shape the outcome.

Adding people does not reduce the decisions that reach you.

Most owners expect the opposite. The firm grows, you add project managers, senior staff, department leaders, and other layers of leadership, yet the same handful of principals still seem to answer questions about staffing, scope, fees, priorities, schedules, and internal conflicts.

The usual conclusion is that people need to step up. Sometimes that is exactly right. Some people lack initiative, confidence, or experience, and no amount of organizational design fixes that. But I have also watched situations where the person was not really the problem. The firm had assigned responsibility far more clearly than it had assigned authority.

The same thing happens in quieter ways.

A principal tells a project manager they own the project, then continues making commitments directly to the client. A department leader is accountable for utilization but does not control staffing assignments. A market leader is expected to grow a practice but has limited authority over pursuits, fees, or resources. Someone is told to improve profitability while several of the decisions that determine profitability still sit somewhere else in the firm.

In each case, the formal message is responsibility. The operating reality is that the authority stayed put.

What people actually need.

An organizational chart can assign responsibility. A job description can describe what someone owns. A principal can say, “You are responsible for this now.” None of that, by itself, creates the conditions for independent judgment. People also need to understand what they are allowed to decide, where the boundaries sit, which priority should prevail when two legitimate objectives conflict, what information they can rely on, and when something genuinely needs to move upward.

That does not mean giving people unlimited authority. It means being deliberate about the relationship between responsibility and decision rights. This matters especially in professional services firms because the work runs on judgment. Architecture and engineering firms cannot operate by converting every decision into a procedure. Technical issues, client expectations, staffing constraints, financial realities, contractual obligations, and professional liability intersect in ways a checklist will never fully capture. The objective is not to remove judgment from the firm. It is to create enough clarity that judgment can actually be exercised.

Why experienced principals can make this worse.

The difficulty is that stepping in often works, at least in the moment. A principal can usually solve the problem faster than the person wrestling with it. They know the client history, remember why a policy exists, understand the contractual nuance, or recognize a risk the other person has not learned to see yet. In the moment, intervening can feel both efficient and responsible.

The problem is that each intervention also teaches the organization where authority really resides. If a project manager is told they own the project while a principal routinely redirects the team or goes around them to the client, people quickly learn which version of the organization matters: the one on the chart or the one they experience every day. They start checking before acting, escalate decisions that belong to them, hesitate to make commitments, and wait for confirmation. From the principal’s chair, that can look like dependence. From theirs, it may simply be an accurate reading of what the firm has taught them.

This is one reason owner dependency can become so persistent. As firms grow, principals accumulate enormous amounts of institutional knowledge. They know which clients require special handling, which promises have already been made, which rules have exceptions, which employees are stretched, and which problems have histories that are invisible to everyone else. Much of that knowledge lives in people rather than in the organization, so when uncertainty appears, people naturally return to the person carrying the missing context.

Over time, the principal becomes more than a leader; they become part of the firm’s operating system. That arrangement can work remarkably well while the firm is small. One experienced person may be able to resolve in five minutes what someone else would spend an hour trying to understand. The problem appears when the firm grows and the same model is expected to scale. Five-minute decisions multiply, and more importantly, the organization never develops the capability the principal keeps supplying.

More process is often the wrong first answer.

Once a leader sees inconsistency, the instinct is often to add an approval, a policy, a meeting, or a form. Sometimes additional structure is exactly what is needed, but process and clarity are not the same thing. A firm can carry extensive procedure and still leave people unsure about who really has authority.

Additional controls can even make the problem worse because people learn that the safest way to operate is to follow the process and escalate anything ambiguous. That may create compliance, but it does not necessarily create better judgment.

A better place to start.

For two weeks, pay attention to the questions that reach the principal level. Instead of treating them simply as interruptions, ask why each one arrived there.

• Did this genuinely require principal judgment?

• Was the authority unclear?

• Were two priorities in conflict?

• Was necessary information unavailable?

• Had there been a previous exception?

• Had this person been given authority and then learned it was safer to ask first?

Those questions reveal more than another conversation about accountability. They begin to show whether the issue is the individual, the role, the information available to them, or the way the organization has actually distributed authority.

What should stay with ownership.

The point is not to remove principals from important decisions. Strategy, capital, risk, major client issues, ownership, key people decisions, and matters affecting the firm’s reputation deserve principal involvement. The point is to become more deliberate about which decisions genuinely require that involvement and which ones keep coming back because the firm never designed anywhere else for them to go.

That is a distinction I wish I had understood more clearly earlier in my career. If someone is accountable for an outcome, they need enough authority to meaningfully influence the decisions that produce it. Otherwise, we have not fully delegated responsibility; we have delegated the expectation of success while keeping much of the control.

Once that happens often enough, the bottleneck is no longer a person.

It becomes part of the design of the firm.

Aaron D. Jenks, AIA NCARB LEED AP

SCHEMATA
Better Firms by Design.