Who Decides What Now?
Getting the role and knowing what is yours to decide are not always the same moment.
The Field Read
A leadership change can look very clear on paper.
New title. New responsibility. New reporting line. A succession announcement. A broader mandate. A team that now reports to you. A function that has been added to your scope.
Then the practical questions begin.
Can I make this call?
Do I need approval, agreement, or input?
What am I still doing that somebody else should own now?
Why are people still behaving as though the old arrangement exists?
Who do people go to when the answer really matters?
The formal change may have happened in a day. The lived transition often takes longer.
That distinction appears across very different kinds of leadership change.
Linda Hill followed 19 first-time managers through their first year in management. Her work showed that becoming a manager continued well after the appointment itself. New managers had to learn to get work done through other people, build new relationships, exercise authority differently, and rethink assumptions about what being "the boss" actually meant.[1]
The same basic tension can appear much later in a career. Research on functional leaders moving into broader enterprise responsibility describes a shift away from relying primarily on deep functional expertise and toward working across functions, competing priorities, and relationships where authority is less direct.[2]
Middle managers can occupy an especially complicated position. A systematic review of healthcare middle managers describes them as sitting between top leadership and frontline practice, translating strategy while working inside complex and changing environments themselves.[3] A separate study of change in the Irish health service found that middle managers working between top-down and bottom-up change could experience additional workload and tension precisely because they were mediating between the two.[4]
And at the top of an organization, succession makes the distinction especially visible. A study based on interviews with 15 successor CEOs in small and midsized privately held businesses found repeated cases in which the successor had the title while the founder still controlled important decisions, relationships, ownership, or practical authority.[5]
None of this means that leadership transitions are inherently unclear.
It does not mean a predecessor should disappear.
It does not mean every difference between responsibility and authority is dysfunctional.
It means something simpler.
Getting the role and knowing what is yours to decide are not always the same moment.
A title is one part of a leadership situation. Formal authority is another. Decision rights are another. Mandate, credibility, ownership, relationships, history, and the expectations other people carry into the new arrangement can all matter too.
Those things do not always move at the same speed.
That is the October orientation question:
Has the handoff happened on paper, in practice, or both?
Not as an accusation.
Not as a diagnosis.
As a way of seeing the situation more accurately.
Signals Worth Noticing
1. The role can become official before the role becomes familiar
A promotion changes formal responsibility immediately. It does not instantly teach someone what the new responsibility means in practice.
Hill's longitudinal work with 19 first-time managers is useful because it followed people through the transition rather than treating the appointment as the transition itself. New managers entered with assumptions about authority and control, then learned through experience that management depended heavily on relationships, credibility, delegation, influence, and work accomplished through others.[1]
That is a first-time-management example, but the orientation question travels.
When responsibility changes, the leader may need time to discover what has actually moved with it.
What decisions are now mine?
What work should I stop doing myself?
Where does my boss still expect to be involved?
What do the people around me think changed?
The appointment can be complete while the practical understanding is still forming.
2. Broader responsibility changes the relationships through which leadership happens
Moving into a broader role is not simply doing more of the previous job.
Michael Watkins' research with more than 40 senior executives on the move from functional to enterprise leadership identified several shifts, including the need to move from specialist to generalist and develop greater cross-functional fluency.[2]
The relevance here is not the framework itself. It is the underlying change in the leadership situation.
A leader who once had deep authority inside one function may now carry responsibility across areas led by other people. Expertise still matters, but expertise alone does not settle who decides what.
The work increasingly depends on relationships, shared ownership, escalation boundaries, and the ability to distinguish a decision that belongs to the leader from one that belongs somewhere else.
That is not necessarily ambiguity. It is a different shape of leadership.
3. Middle leaders often live between strategy and practice
Middle leadership is sometimes described as a communication layer. The evidence suggests something more substantial.
A systematic review of 23 studies of healthcare middle managers found that they occupied a position close to everyday practice while also translating policies and strategies from above. Their development was described as a gradual process of learning, adapting, building confidence, and finding themselves as leaders inside complex environments.[3]
Research on middle managers in the Irish health service similarly found them working at the interface of top-down and bottom-up change. That position could create additional workload and tension as they helped dismantle old structures while also living through the change themselves.[4]
This matters because a leader in the middle can be simultaneously receiving direction, interpreting direction, making decisions, carrying accountability, and creating enough clarity for other people to work.
The organizational chart may show where the leader sits. It may not fully answer what the leader owns.
4. Decision rights can look clear on paper and still be unclear in practice
A 2026 Harvard Business Review article by Lindy Greer, Jennifer Jordan, and Maxim Sytch examines why formal decision-rights tools often fail to produce practical clarity. Their central point is not that frameworks are useless. It is that a document assigning roles does not guarantee that people will actually understand or follow those roles in the moment a decision has to be made.[6]
Deloitte has made a related observation: organizations often assume that structure, process, or workflow will automatically define decision-making practices. In reality, decision rights can remain a blind spot even after redesigns, restructurings, or mergers.[7]
This is one reason October is not an issue about teaching a decision-rights methodology.
The earlier recognition is more human:
Can I make this call?
Do I need approval?
Who has input?
Who owns the final decision?
If people cannot answer those questions consistently, the formal structure may not yet describe the lived structure.
5. A predecessor can remain and still help the transition
The easiest story to tell about succession is that the old leader needs to get out of the way.
The evidence does not support a rule that simple.
Bridgespan and Stanford Social Innovation Review examined 106 nonprofit founder transitions. Forty-five percent of the organizations created an ongoing role for the founder. Among organizations where founders stayed, 75 percent reported that the benefits of the continuing role justified the complexity. The research also found that transitions pairing a continuing founder with an internal successor performed particularly well on the measures examined.[8]
That is an important counterweight.
A predecessor staying involved does not make the transition unclear.
Unclear boundaries can make the transition unclear.
Those are not the same claim.
There is also evidence in the other direction. Quigley and Hambrick studied 181 CEO successions in public technology firms and found that when the former CEO remained as board chair, the successor's discretion and strategic change could be constrained.[9]
Taken together, these findings argue against treating predecessor presence itself as the problem.
The more useful orientation question is what the continuing relationship actually means.
What still belongs to the predecessor?
What belongs to the successor?
What is shared?
What do employees, customers, owners, and board members believe about that arrangement?
The person staying is not the diagnosis.
The boundaries are what deserve attention.
The Pattern
The Handoff May Happen at More Than One Speed
The strongest pattern in this month's evidence is not that leaders lack authority.
It is not that organizations are becoming more dysfunctional.
It is not that founders or predecessors need to leave.
It is that a change in leadership responsibility can contain several handoffs at once.
The title can move.
Formal authority can move.
Decision rights can move.
Accountability can move.
Relationships can move.
Legitimacy can develop.
Knowledge can remain with the person who held the role before.
Ownership may not move at all.
Those are different things.
In a clean transition, many of them may align quickly enough that the distinction barely becomes visible.
In another transition, they may move at different speeds.
A new manager has formal authority but is still learning how to exercise it through people who were peers yesterday.
A senior operations leader is responsible for several departments but has to stop making decisions that now belong to the managers beneath them.
A VP takes on broader enterprise responsibility and discovers that important outcomes depend on peers who do not report to them.
A successor CEO takes the title while the founder remains owner, chair, adviser, customer relationship holder, or simply the person everyone has trusted for 30 years.
These are not four different problems.
They are different places where one leadership condition can become recognizable:
The role can become official before the leader fully understands what this situation now asks them to own, decide, delegate, share, or leave with someone else.
That is why the central proposition remains:
Getting the role and knowing what is yours to decide are not always the same moment.
Recognition From the Field
Formal research establishes that this condition deserves attention. Public first-person accounts help us hear what it can sound like from inside the role.
These accounts do not establish prevalence. They are recognition evidence.
A newly promoted manager wrote on Reddit:
"What are managers supposed to do? I understand what I've been asked to do so far, but I don't really understand the role."[10]
The same person explained that a reorganization had placed both the new manager and the new boss into an unexpected situation. The formal promotion existed. The practical meaning of the role was still becoming clear.
Another manager, after moving into a senior operations role overseeing three departments, described realizing that a hands-on style that had worked previously no longer worked at the new scope. The question had become how to delegate and manage work through other people rather than continuing to rely on personal technical contribution.[11]
A supervisor promoted above a previous role described still covering a significant portion of that former job six months later while also receiving new work from above. In their words, they were "continuously being expected to take new tasks from my manager as he delegates while being unable to delegate myself."[12]
And another first-time manager asked a question that sounds almost ordinary enough to miss:
"How do you strike the balance between delegation versus doing the work yourself?"[13]
These are not proof that leadership transitions are broadly broken.
They are useful because they sound like the questions people ask before they have a formal vocabulary for the situation.
Am I still supposed to do this myself?
Can I make this call?
Do I step in, or let my managers handle it?
Why am I responsible for this if I cannot decide it?
Who actually owns this?
Why are people still behaving as though the old arrangement exists?
The language matters because recognition often arrives before diagnosis.
A leader may not need a framework first.
They may need a sentence that helps them say:
Yes. That is what I have been experiencing.
What Deserves Attention
- Notice where the organization behaves differently from the organization chart. A reporting line can be formally correct while people still route consequential questions through an older relationship. That does not automatically mean resistance. It may simply show where trust, knowledge, or legitimacy still lives.
- Distinguish responsibility from decision authority. Being accountable for an outcome does not necessarily mean owning every decision connected to it. The useful question is not whether those two things are identical. It is whether the leader understands the difference.
- Observe what did not move when the role changed. A title may change while customer relationships, ownership, institutional memory, informal influence, technical expertise, or approval rights remain somewhere else. Those continuities may be valuable. They still shape the leadership situation.
- Ask what other people believe changed. A handoff is partly relational. The leader, boss, predecessor, peers, team, board, or owners may be operating from different assumptions about the same transition.
- Clarify the difference between needing input and needing permission. Those can feel similar from inside an uncertain role. They are not the same. A leader can have decision authority and still need serious consultation. Another leader may have broad responsibility but require approval on a narrow set of consequential decisions.
None of these observations tells a leader what to do next.
They help reveal the situation that the next decision will have to fit.
An Executive Orientation Distinction
Formal authority is not the whole leadership situation.
A title can confer authority.
It cannot instantly confer history.
It cannot instantly transfer every relationship.
It cannot instantly create credibility.
It cannot automatically tell everyone which decisions moved and which did not.
And it cannot erase the value of the person who came before.
That is why Executive Orientation begins before prescription.
The question is not:
How do I seize more authority?
The question is:
What is actually mine to lead and decide now?
There may eventually be work to do around decision rights, delegation, governance, role design, succession, or organizational structure.
October does not assume that.
The earlier work is recognition.
Has the handoff happened on paper, in practice, or both?
What We Would Not Conclude Yet
We would not conclude that leadership transitions are generally becoming less clear.
We would not conclude that a difference between formal authority and practical influence means a leader is being undermined.
We would not conclude that a predecessor remaining involved is inherently harmful. The Bridgespan evidence provides a strong reason not to make that assumption.[8]
We would not conclude that every leader should have unilateral decision authority over the outcomes for which they are accountable.
We would not conclude that first-time management, middle leadership, senior functional leadership, and CEO succession are the same experience. The evidence supports a condition that can appear across those settings, not a claim that the settings themselves are equivalent.
And we would not conclude that uncertainty during a transition is evidence of organizational failure.
Some things take time to become real in practice.
The purpose of noticing is not to make the situation wrong.
It is to see it more accurately.
Worth Your Time
One Question to Carry Forward
Has the handoff happened on paper, in practice, or both?
About The Executive Orientation Brief
The Executive Orientation Brief is a monthly field reading for experienced leaders navigating changing roles, mandates, organizations, careers, authority, and professional conditions.
It is designed to help a leader recognize what may be changing before deciding what to do about it.
Research establishes the condition. Lived experience makes the condition recognizable. Executive Orientation helps the reader see the situation more accurately.