Most scaling organisations believe the same thing about their struggling senior hires: they need to take more ownership.
The head of product who keeps escalating decisions she should be making herself. The country manager who waits for sign-off before moving on anything real. The COO who runs every budget shift upward instead of just deciding.
The read is always personal. Not decisive enough. Not senior enough for the seat. Needs to grow into the role.
I think that read is wrong, more often than it’s right.
What’s actually happening in most of these cases isn’t a person failing to claim authority. It’s a person who was never structurally given it — carrying full accountability for an outcome, without the actual decision rights that would let them produce it on their own.
The head of product owns the delivery timeline. She doesn’t own the resourcing decisions that determine whether it’s achievable. The country manager owns the revenue number. He can’t approve the hires that would move it. The COO owns operational performance, and has to ask permission to move money across functions to affect it.
None of this was designed. It accumulated. A role expanded during a hiring push, and nobody revisited who could actually decide what. A function grew past the org chart that was drawn for a company half its size. The chart still says these people own their outcomes. The actual distribution of decision rights, quietly, moved somewhere else.
This is where the ownership diagnosis becomes seductive. It’s simpler to believe the person than the structure. It doesn’t require anyone to touch the org chart, revisit who reports to whom, or admit that a role was built to fail before anyone was placed inside it. “They need to own it more” costs nothing to say and nothing to fix. It just doesn’t fix anything either.
Watch what the senior hire actually does instead. They escalate decisions that look, on paper, like theirs to make. They build informal influence networks to get things done they have no formal permission to do. They wait for an alignment call that never quite happens, because nobody above them realises they’re waiting for one.
Eventually, one of two things happens. They leave, and the organisation reads it as attrition — a hire who “didn’t work out.” Or they stop trying to close the gap, and accountability becomes a title rather than a fact.
Either way, the organisation replaces them. Hires someone new into the same seat. Watches, a year later, as the pattern returns.
It isn’t the person. It was never the person. It’s the seat.