PERSPECTIVE | 09.18.2026

002

Delegating the Expectation of Success

Earlier in my career, I watched a senior project manager ask a project architect to step into the PM role and run a project. The conversation was brief, and both of them walked away believing the handoff had been clear.

I have always thought about the project manager role in terms of three ultimate responsibilities: Budget, Quality, and Schedule. Firms organize many of the surrounding responsibilities differently. Sometimes the PM carries the client relationship and sometimes a principal does. Staffing authority, fee negotiations, and technical leadership can also sit in different places depending on the firm. Those variations can all work. What matters is that someone owns the major outcomes and has enough authority to influence them.

Within a few weeks, that distinction had become blurred. The Project Architect understood that they had been asked to take on the PM role, but the Senior PM continued operating in ways that suggested several of its responsibilities had not actually moved. Direction still reached the team from above the PA. Staffing decisions still required someone else. Fee conversations continued without the Project Architect being fully involved.

From the Project Architect's perspective, it was reasonable to conclude that the Senior PM was still carrying the larger budget and schedule obligations while the PA concentrated on leading the work day to day. From the Senior PM's perspective, the PM role had been handed off. Neither interpretation was completely unreasonable, which was precisely the problem.

There was never a point where the two of them stopped and deliberately realigned responsibility, authority, and accountability. Nobody defined who now owned the budget, who could change staffing, who was responsible for monitoring the schedule, what decisions had moved, what decisions remained with the Senior PM, or when one of them was expected to involve the other. The title had changed, but the operating relationship around it had not.

The project eventually struggled. The architectural fee ran twenty percent over budget, the schedule slipped, and quality suffered. There were other contributing factors, as there almost always are on a troubled project, but the ambiguity surrounding project leadership clearly did not help.

What stayed with me was not the overrun itself. It was what happened when the firm tried to understand the result. The Project Architect's name was attached to the PM role, so accountability naturally began to settle there. What received less attention was whether the authority to influence budget, quality, and schedule had ever actually moved with the title.

Where delegation breaks down

This is an easy condition to create in an architecture or engineering firm because responsibility can be assigned much faster than authority can be redesigned. A principal tells someone they now own a project. A department leader becomes accountable for utilization. A market leader receives a growth target. A senior employee is asked to assume responsibility for an important client relationship. Each statement can sound perfectly clear while the organization surrounding it remains ambiguous.

The new PM may still need another person's approval to adjust staffing. The department leader may be measured on utilization without controlling where people are assigned. The market leader may carry a growth expectation while having limited influence over pursuits, fees, or resources. Someone may be expected to improve profitability even though several of the decisions that determine profitability remain elsewhere in the firm.

In each case, responsibility has moved more clearly than authority. That is where accountability begins to get confused, and where leaders can start wondering why people are not stepping up even though the organization has never fully defined what stepping up includes.

An organizational chart can assign responsibility, and a job description can describe what someone generally owns, but neither explains how decisions actually get made once real work becomes complicated. People need to understand what they are allowed to decide, what remains with someone else, which priority should prevail when legitimate objectives compete, what information they are expected to use, and when something genuinely needs to move upward.

That does not mean writing a rule for every possible decision. Professional services firms would become unmanageable if every judgment call became a procedure. Technical requirements, client expectations, staffing constraints, contractual obligations, financial realities, schedules, design judgment, and professional liability overlap constantly. The objective is not to remove judgment from the firm. It is to create enough clarity that people can exercise judgment without continually wondering whether someone else is still in charge.

How experienced leaders can make this harder

Experienced leaders are often very good at stepping in. They know the client history, remember why a decision was made six months earlier, recognize risks that someone less experienced has not yet learned to see, and can often resolve in ten minutes what another person might spend an hour trying to work through. In the moment, intervention can feel responsible, and often it is.

The complication is that every intervention also tells the organization something about where authority really sits. If someone is told they own a project but repeatedly watches a more senior person step back into important decisions, they begin to adjust their behavior accordingly. They check before acting, escalate decisions that technically belong to them, hesitate to make commitments, and wait for confirmation before moving forward.

From the principal's chair, that behavior can look like dependence or lack of initiative. From the employee's perspective, however, it may simply be an accurate reading of how the firm actually operates. If experience has taught someone that consequential decisions are likely to be revisited or overridden, asking first is not necessarily passivity. It may be the rational response to the system around them.

More process does not necessarily create clarity

Once leaders recognize inconsistency, the instinct is often to add structure: another approval threshold, another policy, another meeting, another reporting requirement. 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 actually owns a decision.

Additional controls can even reinforce the problem if they teach people that the safest response to ambiguity is always to escalate. That may create compliance, but it does not necessarily create better judgment. The more useful question is whether the operating relationship itself has been designed clearly enough.

For a couple of weeks, pay attention to the decisions that keep reaching the principal or senior-leadership level and ask why each one arrived there. Did the issue genuinely require principal judgment? Was responsibility clear but authority unclear? Were two people working from different assumptions about who owned the decision? Did the person have the information needed to act? Had an earlier intervention taught them that asking first was safer? Was someone being held accountable for an outcome they could not meaningfully influence?

Those questions often reveal more than another conversation about accountability. They begin to show whether the real issue is the individual, the role, the decision rights, the information available, or the way the firm has trained people to behave.

What should stay with ownership

The point is not to push every decision downward. Strategy, capital, significant risk, ownership, major client matters, key people decisions, and issues affecting the firm's reputation properly deserve senior involvement. What matters is whether that involvement is deliberate and whether everyone understands where the boundary actually sits.

If you intend to retain a decision, say so. If you are delegating it, transfer enough authority for the person to meaningfully influence the outcome. If responsibility is shared, define what that means before the project is in trouble.

That is the distinction I wish I had understood more clearly earlier in my career. If someone is accountable for budget, quality, schedule, or any other meaningful result, they need enough authority to 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.

When 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.