A CEO once handed me their org chart like it was a map.
Boxes, lines, a clean hierarchy running from the top down to the newest hire. It told me who reported to whom, who sat where, who had which title. It looked complete. It looked like the kind of document you could trust.
It told me almost nothing about how a decision actually moved through that company.
What the chart doesn’t show
The VP of Product needed three separate sign-offs for a call that was, on paper, entirely hers. Meanwhile, the Head of Ops could commit six-figure spend without asking a single person. Neither of these facts showed up anywhere on the chart. They only became visible once something stalled long enough for someone to ask why.
An org chart is drawn to answer one question: who reports to whom. It was never built to answer a much more important one: who can say yes.
Those two questions get treated as if they’re the same. They aren’t. Reporting lines are about structure and oversight. Decision rights are about where authority genuinely lives, and that can drift a long way from what the chart implies, especially as a company grows past the size where the founder personally remembers every exception they’ve made.
Why this gap widens with growth
In a ten-person company, the chart and the reality are usually close enough. The founder knows who’s actually deciding what, because they’re still deciding most of it themselves.
Past a certain size, that stops being true. New layers get added. Titles get assigned. And with each layer, the gap between “who’s on the chart” and “who’s actually empowered” tends to widen, quietly, without anyone deciding it should.
Nobody sits down and designs this gap on purpose. It accumulates. A decision gets escalated once, for a good reason, and the precedent sticks. A new hire isn’t sure of their scope, so they default to asking. A leader steps in during a crisis and never quite steps back out. None of these moments look like a structural problem in the moment. Together, they are one.
What this actually costs
The cost isn’t dramatic. It’s not a crisis, at least not at first. It’s slower execution on things that shouldn’t be slow. It’s capable people asking permission for decisions that are, in writing, theirs to make. It’s a leadership team that keeps discovering, in postmortems, that “everyone thought someone else owned that.”
The org chart will keep looking clean the entire time this is happening. That’s part of what makes it hard to see. The document that’s supposed to represent your organization’s structure isn’t lying exactly, but it’s answering a much narrower question than the one leaders assume it’s answering.
The chart will keep telling you who reports to whom. It was never built to tell you where a decision actually resolves, and most leaders don’t notice the difference until something important stalls in the gap between the two.
Myrto Zehnder partners with CEOs and founders of scaling organisations on the structural architecture underneath recurring organisational problems.
The Eagle’s Perspective — myrtozehnder.com