Picture a leader who can’t walk to the coffee machine without being stopped three times for an answer. There is a line outside their door. Every approval, from a six-figure contract to the color of the new binders, runs across their desk. They feel indispensable, and in a way they are, which is exactly the problem. The organization can only move as fast as one person can think, and that person is exhausted.
Very few organizations set out to build this. It creeps in. A leader makes a call once to be helpful, then again, and before long the team has learned that the quickest way to get an answer is to avoid deciding anything themselves. The fix is a simple idea that is surprisingly hard to practice: decisions should be made at the lowest level possible, by the people closest to the information and closest to the consequences.
This idea shows up again and again in the best leadership books on the shelf. It also shows up somewhere you might not expect.
Business writing has long followed an unwritten rule: leave religion, politics, and other “adult” conversation out. Today we are going to break one of those rules.
The Catholic Church is one of the oldest and largest organizations on Earth, with roughly 1.4 billion members and more than 200,000 parishes. You might expect an institution of that size to be hopelessly centralized, with every question routed through Rome. In practice, it works in layers.
Some decisions can only be made in Rome: matters of doctrine, the appointment of bishops, the declaration of saints. Others belong to the archdiocese: assigning priests, opening or merging parishes, and overseeing the Catholic schools in the region. But the overwhelming majority of decisions are made at the parish level. What time is the Saturday evening Mass? Who is running the youth group this year? Is the Lenten fish fry serving haddock or cod? Nobody is calling the Vatican about the bingo schedule.
Here is the part that surprised us. The Church didn’t just stumble into this structure; it gave the idea its name. In 1931, Pope Pius XI described the principle of subsidiarity in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, arguing that it is an injustice for a larger, higher body to take over work that a smaller, closer one can handle on its own. Business schools and management consultants teach the concept today, but it was written down in Rome nearly a century ago.
To be clear, we are not recommending the Church as a model for everything. Its failures at the top, most painfully the abuse scandals, are a sobering lesson of an entirely different kind, and a reminder that pushing decisions down is never a substitute for accountability at the top. But as an example of how a massive organization can let local leaders actually lead, it is hard to beat.
It’s Your Ship
When Captain D. Michael Abrashoff took command of the USS Benfold in 1997, the destroyer was among the poorest performers in the Pacific Fleet. Morale was low, retention was worse, and plenty of sailors were counting the days until they could leave. Within two years, the Benfold was widely regarded as one of the best ships in the Navy, a turnaround Abrashoff tells in It’s Your Ship (a great read an possibly a future recommendation in our newsletter).
He didn’t get there by issuing more orders. He got there by handing ownership back to the crew. Abrashoff sat down individually with the sailors on board and asked what they would change. When crew members brought him problems or ideas that fell within their own areas, his answer became the title of the book: “It’s your ship.” In other words, you have the authority, so make the call and own the result.
Many of the ideas that surfaced were small and practical. In one well-known example, sailors had been spending countless hours chipping and repainting rusting hardware on the ship’s exterior. A crew member suggested swapping it for stainless steel, and a chore that had eaten up labor for years largely went away. No admiral would have thought of it. The people doing the work did.
Abrashoff’s broader point was that a captain has to learn to see the ship the way the crew sees it. The people closest to the problem usually understand it best, and a leader who insists on making every decision throws that knowledge away.
Decentralized Command
Jocko Willink, the retired Navy SEAL officer, calls this Decentralized Command, and it runs throughout his various books including Leadership Strategy and Tactics: Field Manual. His argument is practical rather than philosophical. No single leader can manage everything happening on a battlefield or in a business, so the organization has to be built to function without the leader in every room.
The key, in Willink’s view, is that junior leaders must understand not only what they are supposed to do but why. When the people on the front line know the leader’s intent, they can make sound decisions in situations no plan anticipated. When they don’t, they either freeze or call up the chain for direction, and by the time the answer comes back, the moment has often passed.
Willink also puts the burden squarely on the leader. If the team isn’t making decisions, the first question is not what is wrong with them. It is whether the leader has explained the mission clearly and given people the room to act. He adds that a leader buried in every detail loses the ability to see the bigger picture. Stepping back, or detaching, is not abdication. It is what allows the leader to watch the whole operation and spot what everyone else is too close to see.
Structure Comes First
Pushing decisions down only works when everyone knows who owns what. Gino Wickman’s Traction, the book behind the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), starts there with the Accountability Chart. Unlike a traditional org chart that simply shows who reports to whom, the Accountability Chart spells out the major functions of the organization and the handful of core responsibilities each seat carries. Wickman’s advice is to design the right structure first and then put the right people in the right seats, not the other way around.
Once the seats are clear, Traction offers a tool called Delegate and Elevate. Leaders list everything they spend time on and sort it by what they love and are great at versus what drains them or could be handled just as well by someone else. The lower-value work gets handed off, so leaders can spend their time where they add the most. Every seat on the chart comes with decision-making authority, and the leader stops being the default owner of everything.
Process Is What Makes Freedom Possible
Mike Paton and Lisa Gonzalez’s Process!: How Discipline and Consistency Will Set You and Your Business Free tackles the fear that keeps so many leaders from letting go: if I’m not involved, how do I know it will be done right?
Their answer is process. When the core ways an organization does its work are documented, simplified, and, in EOS language, followed by all, the leader no longer needs to be present for every decision. The process carries the standard. It sounds counterintuitive, but the authors argues that this kind of structure creates freedom rather than restricting it. A team that knows the process can make confident decisions within it, and the leader can trust those decisions without checking each one.
It is the same idea behind Willink’s well-known mantra: “Discipline equals freedom.” Clear guardrails don’t slow people down. They are what let people move quickly without asking permission.
Who, Not How
Dan Sullivan, cofounder of Strategic Coach, has spent decades helping entrepreneurs get out of their own way. In Who Not How, written with Dr. Benjamin Hardy, he observes that when a new goal or problem lands on a leader’s desk, the instinct is to ask how to do it. The better question is who can do it. A leader who keeps asking “how” ends up doing everything personally. A leader who asks “who” builds a team capable of deciding and acting on its own.
Sullivan’s concept of Unique Ability points in the same direction. Everyone has a set of activities they are naturally great at and energized by, and organizations work best when people spend most of their time there. Pushing decisions down isn’t only about efficiency. It lets people do more of the work they are best at, and it frees the leader to do the same.
The Hot Dog Test
Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality tells the story of how Eleven Madison Park went from a well-regarded restaurant to being named the best restaurant in the world. One of the book’s most memorable moments involves a table of visitors on their last night in New York. Over the course of an extraordinary meal, they mentioned that they had eaten at all the great restaurants in the city but never had a classic New York street hot dog. Guidara ran outside, bought one from a cart, and the kitchen plated it and served it as a course. The guests never forgot it.
What makes the story matter for leaders is what came next. Guidara didn’t want moments like that to depend on him. He built a culture where anyone on the team was encouraged to notice those small details and act on them, and he eventually created a dedicated role to help make those moments happen. His 95/5 rule, managing 95 percent of the budget with discipline and spending the last 5 percent generously on moments like these, is as much a guardrail as a philosophy. It tells the team exactly how much room they have to play.
Guidara sums up the difference this way: “Service is black and white; hospitality is color.” Following the rules gets you service. The color comes from people who have the judgment, and the freedom, to go beyond them.
What Still Goes to Rome
None of this means every decision belongs at the bottom. The Church reserves certain matters for Rome for good reason, and every organization has its own version: vision and core values, major financial commitments, significant legal or safety exposure, and key hires. The real skill is sorting. When a decision comes up, a few questions help:
- Who is closest to the information needed to make this call?
- Who will live with the consequences?
- Does the decision fall within our documented processes and core values?
- If it goes wrong, is it easy to fix, or costly and hard to undo?
If the answers point to the front line, and they usually will, the decision belongs there. The truly “Rome-level” decisions tend to be fewer than leaders expect.
When They Get It Wrong
They will, sometimes. Every author above accepts that a team empowered to decide will occasionally decide differently than the leader would have. That is part of the deal. The cost of an occasional imperfect decision is almost always smaller than the cost of a team that won’t decide at all.
How the leader responds determines whether people keep deciding. Punish a reasonable mistake and decisions flow right back up the chain. Coach it, and the next decision gets better. Sullivan’s The Gap and the Gain, another collaboration with Dr. Hardy, offers a helpful lens here: measure progress against where you started, not against an imagined ideal. A team that is making more good decisions this year than last is winning, even if not every call is the one you would have made.
Bringing It Home
The next time someone brings you a question, pause before answering. Ask yourself whether it is truly a Rome-level decision, or whether it belongs at the parish. More often than not, you will find it is a fish fry question, and the person asking already knows the answer better than you do.
When that happens, borrow a line from Captain Abrashoff and hand it back: “It’s your ship.”
Kevin M. Duffy
Principal
Duffy Engineering
