You've built a strong leadership team. So why are you still making all the decisions?

You’ve hired experienced people. They know their disciplines better than you do, they’re taking responsibility for important parts of the business, and you have a strong leadership team around you.

But when something important needs deciding, does it still come back to you?

I see this quite a lot in the founder-led tech and SaaS businesses I work with, particularly as the business grows with a relatively lean team. It isn’t necessarily that you haven’t delegated. Often you have.

The question is whether you’ve delegated the authority as well as the responsibility.

Responsibility isn’t the same as authority

There will always be decisions that should sit with you. It’s your business, and nobody is suggesting you hand over the keys and disappear.

But there is a difference between somebody being responsible for an area of the business and having the authority to make decisions within it.

You remain involved in decisions you thought you had moved away from, whilst the person you’ve hired can find themselves responsible for an outcome without having quite enough authority to influence it.

People develop judgement by being allowed to use it.

We recruit senior people partly because of the judgement they bring, but then sometimes give them very little opportunity to exercise it. If the difficult or uncomfortable decisions continually travel upwards, they don’t get the same opportunity to make the call, see what happens, learn from it and become more confident in the next one.

Of course they won’t get every decision right. Neither do founders.

But if you’re waiting until you’re completely confident in somebody’s judgement before you give them greater authority, there’s a bit of a problem. How do they develop the experience that gives you that confidence?

When another senior hire enters the picture

This becomes particularly important when you’re thinking about adding another senior person to the team. If you’re not clear about where responsibility and authority should sit already, another hire doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.

I had a client come to me because they thought they needed a COO. It was a perfectly reasonable assumption. The business had ambitious growth plans, and they needed more support at leadership level.

But as we talked about what this person actually needed to achieve, it became clear that simply bringing in somebody to take ownership of operations wasn’t the answer.

They needed someone who could work across the business, bring stability and reassurance, support the existing executive leadership team and help create the structure around them that would enable other people to step up and take more ownership.

What we were describing wasn’t a COO. It was a Chief of Staff.

And that wasn’t simply a change of job title. It changed the experience we needed, the behaviours we were looking for, how this person would work with the rest of the leadership team and, ultimately, who I needed to go out and find.

Understanding what actually needs to change

Sometimes another senior hire absolutely is the answer. There’s a capability you don’t have, the business has outgrown the current structure or there is simply more to do than the existing team can reasonably absorb.

Sometimes, though, another person only solves part of it.

If you’re surrounded by good people but still find yourself involved in too many decisions, it’s worth asking whether the gap is another senior hire, whether the role you had in mind is actually the right one, or whether the people already around you could take more ownership if they had the authority to do it.

Any of those could be the answer.

For me, the important bit is understanding what needs to change before deciding that recruitment is the answer. And if you’d value another perspective on that, I’m always happy to have the conversation.