The Owner Won’t Like That

I heard some version of that sentence more than once in my career. The owner won’t like that.

The owner had hired me to make those decisions. That was part of the job. Even so, I’d make a call well within that authority and every so often it wouldn’t get followed. Not because the owner had said otherwise. People were making assumptions about what the owner wanted.

Other times, someone who didn’t like my decision would take it straight to the owner. Sometimes the owner didn’t even know I’d already made it. Other times the owner knew, agreed with the employee, and nobody came back to talk to me.

When that happened, I’d ask the owner a simple question: why did you make that decision?

Sometimes it was habit. Someone walked in with a question, the way people always had, and the owner answered it. Other times the owner honestly hadn’t realized I’d already decided. I understood both. But I’d be giving you a tidier story than the real one if I said it was always innocent. Now and then, someone didn’t like the answer they got from me and went looking for a better one. I wouldn’t say that about everyone, but it happened.

I never had a problem with people talking to the owner. It’s the owner’s company. What frustrated me was what didn’t happen next. The owner rarely turned to that employee and said, “Go back to the CFO next time.” The question got answered, and the habit stayed right where it was.

It ran the other direction, too. There were times the owner and I had already talked an issue through and agreed on the answer. I’d communicate the decision, and someone would say, “The owner would never agree to that.”

Except the owner already had.

To the owner’s credit, when it came up, they supported me. But that support rarely changed the behavior for good. The next time something unpopular came along, we’d go through the whole thing again.

Sometimes the consequences went beyond who had the authority to make a decision. More than once, the first I heard that a decision had been made was an invoice landing on my desk. Once, it was a piece of new equipment I didn’t know had been ordered.

The equipment was needed. I’ll say that plainly. The COO believed he had the authority to buy it, and he’d told the CEO. Nobody told me. The cash had already been earmarked for debt reduction, so now we had two legitimate priorities competing for the same dollars, and the person responsible for managing the company’s cash found out when the equipment showed up.

I don’t tell that story to fault the COO. It wasn’t necessarily a bad operational decision. It was a decision made without the full financial picture, and that’s what happens when the people running operations and the person running the numbers aren’t talking before the money moves.

Here’s what that taught me. You can’t reasonably hold someone responsible for the financial results while routinely leaving them out of the decisions that produce those results. I was being held responsible for the outcome, and sometimes the decisions behind it were made without me.

It wasn’t only my chair, either. There were occasions when the CEO made a decision and the owners later overturned it because someone went straight to them. If the CEO’s delegated authority wasn’t always safe, it’s not surprising mine wasn’t.

I’ve wondered, and I can’t prove it, whether people learned to go around the person in charge partly because they’d watched it happen at the top. I’m not saying that to criticize the owners. Think about how these companies get built. The owner spends years making nearly every decision, and that’s often why the company works at all. People learn that the owner is the answer, and for a long time they’re right. Asking anyone to change that habit isn’t easy.

But I think this is a growing-company problem. The owner hires good people to run different parts of the business, which is the right move, and then the real work begins. Supporting an executive on one decision is a good thing, and I was grateful for it. Building an organization that consistently respects that executive’s authority is something else. The first is a moment. The second is how people behave the next time, and the time after that, without anyone having to say it. People pay attention to what leadership does, not just what the organization chart says.

If you’re an owner or CEO reading this, I’d guess you’ve done some version of it. Not because you meant to undermine anyone, but because making those decisions had been your job for years. And if you’ve been the executive on the other side of that desk, you know exactly what I mean.

An owner can delegate authority, but unless the organization respects it, and the owner reinforces it, nothing really changes.