With annual reviews approaching, promotion conversations are underway. Those conversations tend to focus on responsibilities, titles, and compensation. What can remain unclear is what the person will now have the authority to decide.

Without that clarity, familiar patterns continue. A client asks about additional services, and the new principal says they’ll get back to them after checking with you. A project manager needs a staffing decision, and the answer is the same.

Within a few months, staff and clients have figured out where decisions really get made. They start going straight to you.

People outside the firm see it, too. Over 30 years of hiring and working alongside engineering and consulting firms, I learned quickly which principals could make commitments within their role and which still needed the owner’s approval.

Usually, nobody intended it to work this way. The firm treated the promotion as recognition and never treated it as a transfer of authority.

Decisions back up with the same few leaders. Additional services get performed before anyone prices them, and some never get billed. The person you meant to develop loses credibility with the people they’re supposed to lead.

Some stay and quietly do the same job with a bigger title. Others eventually look elsewhere for the opportunity to lead.

Before your next promotion announcement, write down the specific decisions this person now owns.

Can they negotiate and approve additional-service proposals within agreed limits? Reassign staff within their project team? Resolve a client concern without checking with you first?

If they aren’t ready for all of it, set boundaries and widen them as their judgment develops. They need to know where they can act and when they should involve someone else.

Then write the harder list: what the current principals agree to stop deciding.

Established leaders have to change their habits, too. When someone bypasses the new principal, do you answer the question, or send the decision back where it belongs?

Firms tend to work the way they’re designed, even when nobody designed them on purpose. A promotion is one of the few moments when you get to redesign who decides what.

If that second list is hard to write, it’s worth understanding why. I work with firm owners to clarify those decisions and put that authority into practice. Send me a message.

Schemata helps AEC owners and senior leaders address the organizational conditions behind recurring problems and design clearer ways to lead, make decisions, and operate.

Aaron D. Jenks, AIA, NCARB, LEED AP
Founder, Schemata AEC L.L.C.