Not for better pay. For a place where they can actually make a fucking decision.
You're drowning in 47 approval meetings this week. 83 decisions rotting in your inbox. Three companies waiting on you to tell them what color to paint the walls.
And you're confused why nothing moves fast anymore.
I'll tell you why: You've become the thing you swore you'd never be - a bottleneck with a god complex.
Here's what happened, and you didn't notice:
Month one, your Director of Product sends you a roadmap decision. You're in Singapore. Four days to respond.
Month two, they send another. Except this time? It's neutered. Safe. Boring.
Because they learned that bold moves die in your calendar.
Month six, they stop thinking entirely. They only submit what they already know you'll approve.
Congratulations. You just spent $140K/year on someone who's now afraid to use their brain.
You think the problem is slow approvals.
Wrong.
The problem is you've trained your entire organization to stop seeing opportunities.
Your teams don't propose anything that needs:
They only surface what can survive sitting in your inbox for three weeks.
So while you're "maintaining quality," your competitors - the ones who trust their people - are moving on opportunities your teams never even mentioned to you.
You're not slow. You're blind. And you did it to yourself.
I know why you centralized. Something expensive broke. The $180K fuckup. The brand disaster. The partnership that nearly imploded.
So you grabbed the wheel. Tightened everything. Started reviewing every decision personally.
And it worked! Mistakes went down.
What you didn't track: opportunity capture collapsed faster.
You're now running three companies optimized for not fucking up. Not for winning. Not for moving fast. For surviving your approval process.
That's not leadership. That's defensive operations dressed up as control.
Look, this pattern is predictable. I've seen it fifty times:
You centralize in an emergency. It works. Teams stabilize. You feel validated.
Then the invisible rot starts: your best people stop proposing anything interesting because interesting ideas need decisions faster than your calendar allows.
Then your senior people leave. You replace them with people who are comfortable waiting for permission.
You've now accidentally selected for mediocrity.
Then your companies can only do what's safe enough to wait three weeks for approval.
And you sit there wondering why growth feels like pushing a boulder uphill.
Wrong question: "How do I approve things faster?"
Right question: "Why the fuck am I approving this at all?"
If a decision loses value waiting for you, it shouldn't need you.
Your job isn't to approve everything. Your job is to build a system where your approval is the exception, not the rule.
What actually needs you:
Strategic direction. Big capital decisions. Brand-defining moves. Structural governance.
That's it.
Everything else - tactical execution, budget deployment, operational calls, timing-dependent decisions - should run without you.
If your team can't execute those without you, the problem isn't them. It's that you never built the boundaries.
The fix is simple, and you're going to hate it:
Stop controlling outcomes. Start controlling systems.
Define who decides what. Set risk limits. Create escalation rules. Build reversibility protocols.
Then get out of the way.
Your Director of Product should be making roadmap calls within those boundaries. Not asking your permission.
If they violate the boundaries - that's when you step in. Not before.
But you won't do this. Want to know why?
Because you don't trust systems. You trust your instinct.
You got here by having better judgment than everyone else. By catching things others missed. By being the smartest person in every room.
So the idea of not reviewing every decision feels dangerous.
Here's what you're missing: Your judgment doesn't scale.
You don't have full context on 80% of what you're approving. You're making calls based on 15-minute summaries of situations your team has been living in for weeks.
You're not adding judgment. You're adding delay and calling it quality control.
Your team hears one thing when you centralize approvals: "I don't trust you."
Even if that's not what you mean. Even if you think you're just maintaining standards.
That's what lands.
And talented people? They don't stick around in places where their judgment doesn't matter.
They leave. And you hire people who are fine not thinking.
Then you wonder why everything feels so goddamn heavy.
The actual risk isn't that your team will screw up if you give them authority.
They're already screwing up. You just can't see it because they're working around you.
The real risk is you choke your own ambition.
You wanted to build multiple companies. You wanted scale. You wanted leverage.
Instead, you built a system that can only move as fast as you can respond to Slack messages.
That doesn't scale. That's a prison you built for yourself.
Your VP didn't leave because they couldn't handle the work.
They left because their judgment became irrelevant.
How many more talented people are you willing to lose before you admit the system is broken?
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