What If You Never Had to Approve Anything Again?
Distributing decision-making authority is how an organization scales past the limits of one person's calendar. Every approval a leader requires carries two costs — the delay while work waits, and the signal that the person's judgment isn't trusted — and at scale the approval habit becomes a hard ceiling on growth. L. David Marquet's principle, “don't move information to authority; move authority to the information,” is really a blueprint for decision rights: push decisions down to the people closest to the work, paired with the competence and clarity that keep decentralized decisions aligned. His practices of “thinking out loud” and stating intent before acting prevent distributed ownership from becoming distributed chaos. The real test, in Liz Wiseman's words, is whether the organization can win without the leader on the field. This makes the Grow movement of The Hanlon Potential Model™ structural — map your approvals and push one class of decision down for good.
Open your inbox and count the decisions sitting there waiting for your approval. A discount someone wants to offer. A hire someone wants to make. A refund, a policy exception, a vendor choice. Each one represents a moment where your entire organization stopped moving and waited for a single person — you — to say yes.
We tell ourselves those approvals are how we maintain quality and control. More often, they're a tax on speed and a quiet vote of no confidence in the people who brought them. Yesterday we made the case that empowerment means moving the decision, not just the task. Today the question scales up: what would it take to build an organization that doesn't wait on you — and would actually run better because of it?
Key Takeaways
• Every approval you require is both a delay and a signal that you don't trust the person to decide.
• Marquet's principle scales: push decision authority down to where the information — and the work — already lives.
• Decentralized decisions stay safe only when paired with competence and organizational clarity.
• “Thinking out loud” and stating intent keep distributed authority from becoming chaos.
• The real test of a leader is whether the organization performs when they're not in the room.
• This is how the Grow movement of The Hanlon Potential Model™ becomes an organizational capability.
The Hidden Cost of the Approval Bottleneck
Every required approval carries two costs, and most leaders only see the first. The obvious one is speed: work stops and waits, and the whole organization moves only as fast as your inbox. The second cost is quieter and more damaging. Each time you require a sign-off, you tell a capable person that their judgment isn't sufficient — and people who are told that often enough stop exercising judgment at all. They bring you everything, because you trained them to.
Scale makes this worse, not better. A bottleneck that's merely annoying with a team of five becomes an organizational cap at fifty. You cannot grow past the number of decisions one person can make in a day, which means the approval habit isn't just slowing you down — it's setting the ceiling on how large your company can become. The leaders who break through don't get faster at approving. They stop being the approver.
Move the Authority to the Information — At Scale
L. David Marquet's principle from Turn the Ship Around! — “don't move information to authority; move authority to the information” — was designed for a nuclear submarine, but it's really a blueprint for organizational design. The traditional structure pushes information up to decision-makers and pushes decisions back down, adding delay and distortion at every handoff. Marquet inverted it: give the authority to the people who already have the information.
At an organizational level, that means getting deliberate about decision rights. Which decisions genuinely need you, and which have you been holding out of habit? Most leaders discover that the vast majority of what crosses their desk could be owned two or three levels down by people who understand the specifics better than they do. Naming those decisions and formally handing them over — not case by case, but as a standing rule — is how you dismantle the bottleneck on purpose instead of one exhausting exception at a time.
Build the Guardrails: Competence and Clarity
Decentralizing decisions without preparation is how good intentions become expensive messes. Marquet is clear that authority only works when it rides alongside two things, and at scale both have to be built deliberately.
Competence is the organizational investment in training — making sure the people you're empowering can actually make the call well, and treating that development as a precondition, not an afterthought. Clarity is a shared, explicit understanding of what “good” looks like and where the company is heading, so that a hundred people making decentralized decisions still move in the same direction. Strategic clarity is what lets you loosen control without losing coherence. When people know the destination and have the skill to navigate, you don't need to approve each turn. When they don't, no amount of approval will save you anyway.
Thinking Out Loud and Deliberate Action
Two of Marquet's practices translate especially well to organizations. The first he called thinking out loud — actively encouraging people to share their reasoning openly, because an excess of context is far safer than too little. When people voice not just their decisions but the thinking behind them, others can catch a flawed assumption before it becomes a flawed outcome, and leaders can correct course with a light touch instead of a veto.
The second was deliberate action: stating intent before acting, so that decisions are made consciously rather than on autopilot. In a company, building a norm where people declare “here's what I intend to do and why” before they execute gives you a natural checkpoint that doesn't require you to hold the decision. It's the difference between distributed ownership and distributed recklessness — and it's what makes leaders comfortable enough to actually let go.
The Test: Does It Run Without You?
Liz Wiseman frames the goal precisely: great leaders “create organizations that can win without them on the field.” That is the real scoreboard, and it's uncomfortable, because it inverts how many executives measure their own value. If the organization performs beautifully when you're present and stalls when you step away, that's not evidence of your importance — it's evidence of a design flaw you built.
So run the honest test. If you were unreachable for two weeks, what would grind to a halt? Every answer is a decision you've failed to distribute, a place where you've made yourself the single point of failure. The strongest organizations are the ones where that list is nearly empty — not because the leader is absent, but because they spent their energy building decision-makers instead of making decisions.
The Hanlon Potential Model™: Distributing Ownership
This is where The Hanlon Potential Model™ — See, Grow, Back — becomes structural. Seeing and coaching develop individuals; distributing real authority is how that development compounds into an organization that grows people at every level and doesn't route every decision to the top.
Start with a map, not a mandate. This week, list the recurring decisions that currently require your approval, and pick one class of them to push down — permanently. Define who owns it now, what “good” looks like, and the boundaries within which they don't need to ask. Then hold the line the first time someone brings it to you anyway: “You own this. What do you intend to do?” One decision class at a time, that's how a company stops running through one person.
Final Thoughts
An organization that never waits on you isn't a fantasy of absentee leadership — it's the product of the most demanding leadership work there is. It takes building competence, providing relentless clarity, and then doing the genuinely hard thing: letting capable people decide, and living with decisions that aren't yours. The payoff is an organization with a ceiling far higher than any one person's calendar.
Tomorrow we bring this into the practice, where the owner's approvals are the tightest bottleneck of all — and where handing over real ownership is what finally lets a practice grow beyond what one exhausted dentist can personally decide.
Frequently Asked Questions
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By replacing approval with clarity. Instead of checking each decision, you invest once in defining what good looks like and in the training to meet it. Quality then comes from competence and shared standards, not from your inbox — and it scales in a way that personal review never can.
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Genuinely irreversible, high-magnitude, or precedent-setting ones — the calls where being wrong is expensive and hard to undo. Almost everything else can be owned lower down. If you're keeping a decision mainly because it's always been yours, that's a habit, not a reason.
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Treat it as a competence or clarity gap, not proof that decentralization failed. Ask what information or standard was missing, close that gap, and the whole system gets stronger. Pulling the authority back at the first mistake just re-teaches everyone to wait for you.
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Only if you hand over accountability without authority or support. Done right — with clear ownership, real decision rights, and the competence to succeed — most people experience it as trust and growth, not offloading. The difference is whether you also gave them the power to decide, not just the task to do.