For a longer stretch of my career than I’m entirely comfortable admitting, I operated with a mental model that went something like: figure out what the right thing to do is, check that someone above me agrees, then do it. I told myself this was being collaborative, building alignment, making sure I wasn’t moving unilaterally in ways that created problems downstream. And those things are real — they matter. But if I’m being honest, a meaningful part of it was also something else: I was using the approval process as a shield. If I had someone’s sign-off, then if the thing went wrong, the fault was distributed. It wasn’t just on me.
The tell was how I felt when I was preparing for those approval conversations. Not collaborative-minded and focused on building shared understanding — anxious, sometimes, in a way that made me over-prepare, anticipate every possible objection, sometimes actually change the thing I was planning to do based on what I imagined someone might say before I’d even had the conversation. I was managing the outcome before the outcome happened, and I was doing it by not fully owning the decision.
The shift started to happen for me a few years into my leadership career, when I was far enough along that the scope of decisions I was being asked to make was large enough that waiting for explicit approval had become genuinely disabling. Not in a rule-following sense — nobody was requiring me to seek approval, and in fact my leadership was actively signaling that I had the room to operate independently. The constraint was internal. I had more authority than I was using, and I was spending energy on permission-seeking that could have gone into actually leading.
What helped me shift was something a mentor said that I’ve turned over in my mind many times since. She said: “There’s a difference between keeping people informed and asking them to decide. You’re often doing the second when you think you’re doing the first.” That distinction is sharper than it sounds. When you walk into a conversation with a framing of “I’m thinking about X, what do you think?” you’ve structured it as a decision someone else needs to make. When you walk in with “I’ve decided to do X, here’s my reasoning, and here’s what I need from you or want to flag for you” — you’ve kept the decision yours and given the other person what they actually need, which is context and the opportunity to raise concerns if any.
The change in how I operate isn’t about ignoring authority or moving without consideration. There’s a real version of that story — someone who calls everything their call and stops listening — and it’s not a good version. What I’m describing is narrower than that: it’s about having clarity on the difference between decisions that genuinely require someone else’s input or authorization, and decisions that are already mine to make, where the approval-seeking is friction I’m adding to a process that doesn’t need it.
The resistance when I started operating this way was also instructive. Sometimes people who were accustomed to being consulted felt like they were being cut out, even when nothing that affected them had changed. That required some recalibration — making sure the informing was genuinely useful and not perfunctory, making sure the people who needed to know things were genuinely in the loop rather than nominally copied. The goal isn’t to move unilaterally and notify people after the fact as a formality. It’s to know clearly what’s yours to decide and decide it, while keeping the people who depend on you actually informed.
The domain where I’ve had to work hardest on this is organizational decisions — structure, priorities, who works on what. The instinct to check, to make sure everyone’s comfortable, to build consensus before moving, is strong in those areas because the stakes feel high and the people affected are real. But waiting for organizational consensus on organizational decisions is often just deferral dressed up as collaboration. At some point the decision needs an owner, and if it’s mine to make, then making it — with care, with good information, with the people I trust most having had a chance to push back — is the job.
I still seek input — probably more of it now than I used to, because I understand better what good input costs the person giving it and how to actually use it. I just don’t mistake input for permission anymore.