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We ask leaders a simple question sometimes, and it tends to land harder than they expect.
Think about the last ten decisions that came across your desk. How many actually needed your level of authority? And how many showed up because nobody knew who owned the call, or the team didn’t have enough context, or people just learned over time that the boss likes to decide?
That gap is where things get expensive. Not because the person at the top makes bad decisions, but because the organization makes too few of them at the right level.
Here’s the part that catches people off guard. When every decision travels upward, speed dies. Learning slows. Good people check out. And the leader ends up buried in work that was never really theirs to do.
Then AI shows up, and the instinct is to automate the pile. Automate the reporting. Automate the analysis. Automate the handoffs. But if every meaningful decision still waits for one person, you haven’t fixed anything. You’ve just built a faster traffic jam.
The real shift isn’t about being less involved. It’s about being involved in different things. The article gets into what those things are, and the five questions we use to figure out which decisions should never have reached your desk.
If good ideas in your company keep stalling until someone at the top signs off, the bottleneck might not be a process problem. It might be a leadership one.
Book a complimentary discovery call and let’s find the decisions that should be happening closer to the work.
Reply and answer this: What’s one decision that keeps landing on your desk that someone closer to the work could probably own?
Watch Us Build Your First Agent Workflow Live
Join HubSpot for Startups and Dust on October 28 at 11am EDT / 8am PDT for a live webinar.
If logging, enrichment, and routing are eating your team’s week, this one’s for you. We’ll build the agents that handle that go-to-market work in HubSpot and Dust, so your team can get back to selling.
You’ll watch us build a post-call automation and a Slack account ownership layer. Then you can set up the same thing for your team.
