Why You're Approving Decisions You Shouldn't Own — And Escalating Ones You Should

By Patricia Collins  ·  Founder, Pioneer CMO | Ex-IBM VP  ·  Blumaverick

The structural reason capable executives end up carrying decisions that have no formal owner — and what it actually costs before anyone names it.

You're approving things you didn't used to approve. You're escalating things you used to decide. Neither of those shifts shows up in your job description. Both of them show up in your calendar.

You used to make this call in five minutes. Now it takes five meetings.

You used to escalate one thing a quarter. Now it's three things a week.

Your scope grew. The decision rights around that scope didn't.

If you're a VP or Director who keeps absorbing decisions that technically belong somewhere else — and watching your own decisions get routed up to people who don't have the context

— this isn't a delegation problem, a trust problem, or a leadership problem. It's a structural one. And it has a name.

The Short Answer

When a executive’s scope grows faster than the formal authority around them, they end up owning decisions that have no formal home — and escalating decisions they should be making themselves. The org chart was designed for the role they used to hold. Their actual scope is two levels above it. That gap between scope and decision rights is what Blumaverick calls decision-boundary compression —

and it's one of the most expensive structural failures in scaling organizations, because it stays invisible to leadership until a key executive resigns or a major initiative collapses.

Why Your Scope Grew But Your Decision Rights Didn't

Most executives assume scope and authority move together. They don't. They run on completely different cycles.

Scope expands the way water finds gravity. When you're the one who can carry it, the work routes to you — informally, incrementally, without anyone updating anything formal. The VP who joined to run one product line ends up coordinating three. The Director hired to manage a technical team ends up architecting the enterprise transformation. Nobody made a decision to give you that scope. The org just kept handing it to you because you kept handling it.

Decision rights don't move that way. They're embedded in org charts, role descriptions, approval thresholds, signing limits, and governance structures designed at a specific moment in the company's history. They don't update because you're capable. They only update when someone formally redesigns them

— which requires three things most organizations skip: noticing the gap, deciding to fix it, and doing the structural work.

Most organizations don't do that work until the gap creates a visible crisis. A decision that stalled. A VP who quit. A cross-functional initiative that collapsed at a boundary nobody had formally drawn.

By the time leadership notices, the org has been paying for the gap for years.

The Three Patterns This Shows Up In

If you're inside this dynamic, the breakdown appears in one of three places.

At the Role Level, your individual scope has grown beyond your formal mandate. Your decision rights were calibrated to the role you held two years ago. Every consequential decision now requires navigating authority you don't actually hold — through relationships, persuasion, and political capital instead of structural mandate. You're effective. You're also exhausted, because every decision costs more than it should.

At the Function level, your team's scope expanded through a reorg, an acquisition, or a strategic pivot — but the function's formal decision rights never got redesigned around the new scope. You're accountable for outcomes you can't fully authorize. The cross-functional partners who used to defer to your predecessor don't defer to you, because nothing structural changed when you took the role.

At the Organization level, the entire governance model was built for a different company. The org has scaled. The decision architecture hasn't.

Everyone above and below VP/Director is operating inside a framework designed for a company half its current size — and the friction shows up most acutely at the layer that has to translate strategy into execution. That's you.

What This Costs Before Anyone Names It

The reason this stays invisible at the leadership level is that capable executives keep absorbing the gap. Decisions still get made. Initiatives still ship. The org still functions. From the C-suite, everything looks fine.

The cost is only visible to the people carrying it.

It's the decision that should have taken one conversation and took five signoffs. The eighteen-month initiative that stalled every time it crossed a boundary the org hadn't formally drawn. The performance review where the results were strong, the feedback was glowing, and the promotion went somewhere else — because the org evaluated you against your role description, not the scope you were actually running.

This is how organizations lose their most capable load-bearers. Not because those executives failed. Because the org never built the authority architecture that would have made their scope sustainable.

And every time one of those executives walks out the door, the org pays for the gap one more time — in retention costs, in continuity loss, in the institutional knowledge that walks out with them, in the eighteen months it takes to bring a replacement up to a scope that was never formalized in the first place.

What Deliberate Decision Rights Design Looks Like

The alternative to structural drift is structural design.

Organizations that handle this well treat decision rights the same way they treat budgets — as something that gets reviewed, redesigned, and reauthorized on a cycle. When scope expands — through a new strategic priority, a reorganization, or an executive whose operational footprint has grown — the decision rights governing that scope get redesigned in parallel. Not after the next crisis. As part of the original change.

At the individual executive level, the work is more specific. It starts with a structural diagnosis — naming where your scope has outrun your decision rights, and where the gap is widest. From there, the authority architecture around you is redesigned to close it.

That redesign isn't something most executives can do alone, and it isn't something coaching can fix. It's structural work.

That redesign is the structural work at the center of Authority By Design™ — the methodology Blumaverick uses to diagnose and close the gap between what an executive is carrying and the formal authority they hold to act on it. It's not a coaching engagement. It's a structural one.

The BluShift™ Authority Assessment is the diagnostic front end. It maps where your scope has outrun your decision rights, names the specific compression points, and identifies the structural moves that close them.

If three or more of these are true for you right now —

— You're approving decisions you don't formally

own

— You're escalating decisions you should be

making yourself

— Your scope has expanded but your title hasn't

— You're being evaluated at the role you used

to hold, not the one you're actually running

— that's not a performance problem.

That's an Executive Authority Gap™.

The authority gap doesn't close on its own. It closes by design.

If this resonated, I'd like to hear where you're navigating it right now. Connect with me on LinkedIn and let's continue the conversation.

About the Author

Patricia Collins is the Founder of Blumaverick, a private executive advisory. She served as a Pioneer CMO and IBM VP — and now serves as an Executive Advisor to executives and high performers who have been passed over, undercompensated, and underrecognized.

Through her Authority by Design™ framework and BluShift™ methodology, she helps executives close the gap between the responsibility they're already carrying and the authority to match it.

She works with a small number of executive leaders to close this gap in ~90 days.

This is not traditional executive coaching. It is structural advisory — for executives whose scope has already outpaced what coaching can fix.

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