Some managers keep too many direct reports, approve even minor decisions and resist transferring responsibility to more experienced employees. In the short term, this can strengthen their influence. In the long term, however, they create a bottleneck, slow work and limit the preparation of future leaders. Delegation therefore has to include real authority, not just assignment of tasks.
A manager can hold back their own department precisely by trying to remain its most important person. Margery Weinstein describes the problem as power hoarding: the leader concentrates direct reports, information and decision-making authority around themselves even though more experienced people on the team could take on part of it.
One visible manifestation appears during organizational growth. A department gains new employees and its manager keeps all of them as direct reports. In the short term, the manager has complete visibility. At the same time, however, senior team members lose the opportunity to learn how to lead people. The organization may then have several experienced specialists but only one person with formal management experience.
A similar mechanism operates in decision-making. An employee is given responsibility for the result, but every significant exception must be approved by the boss. As soon as the manager is on vacation, ill or occupied with another priority, work piles up. The team also learns that waiting is safer than making an independent decision.
Delegation therefore is not just the distribution of tasks. If someone receives the work but not the corresponding decision right, the manager has merely transferred execution while keeping control. Effective delegation must define what the employee decides independently, which limits they must not cross and in which situations the issue should be escalated.
A leader may have rational reasons for centralization. They have the most experience, do not want a junior colleague to make a mistake, or worry about uneven decision quality. But if every risk is addressed by keeping the decision at the top, the team never gains the experience required for independence. The manager creates the very problem that is then used as an argument for further centralization.
For management development, motivation also matters. A manager’s identity may be based on the idea that their importance grows with the number of people and decisions that pass through them. The organization needs the opposite capability: a manager who can build a system that functions even without their continuous presence.
A simple test is planned absence. Which decisions stop when the manager is away? Who knows the necessary context? Who has the authority actually to act? If the answer in most situations is “it has to wait for the boss,” this is not a high-performing system but an operational dependency.
KEY TERMS
- Power hoarding: Concentrating authority, people and decision-making around one leader.
- Delegation: Transferring accountability for results together with corresponding decision-making authority.
- Decision bottleneck: A person through whom too many decisions must pass.
- Successor development: Creating opportunities for other employees to gain experience in leadership and decision-making.