You Built the Business. Does Every Decision Still Need You?

By Anees K. M.

You have the experience. You may even have the title. But do you have the CXO mindset?

In technology, you may have built your reputation by solving problems others could not. In HR, people may trust you with their most difficult decisions. As a founder, you may know the business more closely than anyone else.

As your responsibilities grow, a different question emerges: how much can your team move forward without waiting for you?

A photograph and a book

During my time at iD Fresh Food, I spent about an hour in discussion with Shiv Shivakumar. His leadership experience spans food, consumer brands and technology, including former roles at PepsiCo India, Nokia and Burger King.

Our conversation was specific to the company, so I won’t recount it here. I subsequently bought his book, The CEO Mindset.

Three challenges from my reading gave me particular reason to reflect: recognising gaps in experience, distinguishing sensible savings from missed opportunities, and learning to delegate.

What follows is my own interpretation, informed by the businesses I have worked with. These questions can be uncomfortable because they touch habits that may have helped a leader succeed.

When experience needs another perspective

A founder can understand the product deeply and still need help with distribution economics. A technology leader can build reliable systems while needing a stronger understanding of working capital. An HR leader can understand people while needing greater exposure to commercial decisions.

Recognising those gaps is part of taking responsibility for the whole business.

I have experienced this myself. Despite my technical background, I pursued an MBA to deepen my understanding of finance, operations and manufacturing. I wanted to participate more effectively in the business decisions around me.

For someone moving towards a CXO role, that is a useful question: where does your expertise help you—and where do you need another perspective?

When saving money costs an opportunity

A delayed hire, a postponed system or training pushed into the next financial year can look like sensible cost control.

Sometimes it is. Sometimes the saving is visible while the cost of waiting is scattered across the business: repeated corrections, slow decisions, missed orders or a leader spending hours on work someone else could handle.

The decision deserves both sides of the calculation.

Before postponing an investment, ask: what will it cost to continue as we are, and what evidence would justify spending now?

This does not mean approving every request. It means examining the consequence of saying no as carefully as the cost of saying yes.

Everyone had an assignment. Did they share the same objective?

During an advisory engagement with a food business in the Gulf, a discussion about opening a new outlet revealed a gap in how responsibilities were being communicated.

One manager had received a request to arrange staff. Another had been informed that a new outlet was opening.

Both were involved in the same expansion, but they had received different parts of the picture.

The staffing manager could arrange the people and complete the assignment. Yet the outlet would only be ready if production, staffing and dispatch were ready together. Who was responsible for bringing those pieces together?

That was the gap I wanted to address. Assigning each department a task did not, by itself, give anyone ownership of the opening.

My recommendation was to move from task-based delegation to outcome-based delegation.

Start with a shared launch plan: the opening date, expected demand, products, people and operational readiness. Give one person responsibility for coordinating the launch, with each function clear about its contribution. Then agree which decisions managers could make themselves and which needed escalation.

The difference matters. Someone asked to “arrange staff” can finish that task without knowing whether the outlet is ready. Someone accountable for launch readiness needs to ask what is missing, coordinate with colleagues and resolve issues within agreed limits.

The CEO should not have to connect every department personally whenever the business opens another outlet.

Give people room to decide

Delegation becomes practical when people understand the outcome, their authority and when to seek help.

A simple decision table can make those boundaries visible:

Illustrative examples; responsibilities and limits should reflect the business.

These boundaries need to work in practice. If every decision within an agreed limit still returns to the leader for approval, the team has responsibility on paper but little authority to act.

AI can support this arrangement by making approved procedures easier to find, summarising operational information and flagging exceptions. Its usefulness depends on the decisions people need to make. A dashboard or AI assistant cannot compensate for unclear ownership.

Five questions a leader can ask this week

1. Which decisions reached me last month that someone else could have made?
2. Which approvals exist because we have never agreed a limit?
3. Where am I relying on experience from an earlier stage of the business?
4. What hire, training or system am I delaying—and what is that delay costing?
5. What information and authority would help my team make the next decision themselves?

The outlet-opening example is a reminder that people can complete their individual assignments while the business outcome still needs someone’s attention.

A leader’s job includes creating the conditions for those responsibilities to come together: a shared objective, clear ownership and enough authority to act.

The real measure of successful delegation is not how much work the CEO hands over. It is how much of the business can move forward intelligently without waiting for the CEO.

For you, what is hardest to hand over: decisions, responsibility or control?

If routine decisions keep returning to your desk, get in touch to discuss how responsibilities and decision authority could work across your team.