Work piles up at decision points — not because people don't know what to do, but because it's never been made clear who can act, what counts as enough to move, or when to escalate.
"My supervisors are experienced. They know what to do. But they still won't move without coming to me first. I don't know if it's a confidence problem or something else."
— Plant Manager, Food ProcessingConfidence is usually not the source of the problem. It's that nobody has ever made it explicitly clear — and safe — for supervisors to make certain calls on their own.
When decision authority isn't explicit, people default to the safe move: escalate. Not because they're weak — but because the system has never made it safe to do otherwise. Every time someone made a call and got second-guessed, they learned to wait.
The fix isn't a training program. It's clarifying who owns what, what counts as enough to act, and what happens when someone calls it wrong — and why that's part of how the agreement gets better.
Every situation looks different up close. What's described here is the pattern — what I find on your floor may confirm it, complicate it, or point somewhere else. I don't arrive with a fixed answer. I arrive with a method for finding the real one.
A 30-minute conversation is usually enough to identify whether this is the right starting point.