Read time: 3.8 min.

{{First Name | My friend}},

She was exactly what the organization needed.

Experienced. Collaborative. Deeply committed to the mission. When the CEO brought her in as Chief Content Officer, the leadership team was ready to move. The strategy was set. The vision was shared. And now, finally, they had the person to help execute it.

Her first two months looked like a model onboarding.

She was building relationships, learning the organization, and moving carefully on the initiatives that touched her CMO counterpart's work. From the outside, everything looked exactly as it should.

But something was quietly costing her that nobody was naming.

It wasn't conflict. The CMO was a strong leader and a genuine collaborator. Their relationship was good from the start.

But every time an initiative required a cross-functional decision, something subtle happened before either of them could move.

A conversation first. Then alignment. Then a check-in to make sure both of them were reading the situation the same way. And then, finally, movement.

None of those steps felt unnecessary in the moment. The organization was building something important, and neither of them wanted to create friction by acting unilaterally on something that touched the other's work.

So they coordinated. Carefully. Consistently. With genuine goodwill on both sides.

What they didn't fully see yet was what that coordination was costing.

Two months in, the CCO had developed an informal operating rhythm with her counterpart. They knew which conversations to have before moving. They knew whose instincts to defer to on which kinds of decisions. They had, without quite naming it, built a system of informal alignment that kept things moving.

It worked. Mostly.

But it required both of them to be present for decisions that, in a well-structured system, either of them could have made alone.

And the energy that should have been driving momentum was going somewhere else entirely.

They were being the glue.

Not because they lacked capability or commitment. Because no one had ever answered the question that would have freed them both.

Where does your authority end and his begin?

That question had never been asked out loud. And in its absence, two of the organization's most senior leaders had quietly become the infrastructure holding their own collaboration together.

A few months into her tenure, the leadership team came together for a retreat. I was brought in to work with them.

As we moved through the work, something shifted in the room.

The careful, professional language that had been holding the dynamic in place started to give way to something more honest.

At one point, the CCO said something she had likely been carrying privately for weeks.

She wasn't frustrated. Her tone was measured and precise. But what she named in that moment was the thing that had been sitting underneath every coordinated conversation, every check-in before acting, every decision that had required two people when it should have required one.

What she owned and what she could decide on her own were two different questions. And the latter had not been clearly answered.

And until someone answered that question explicitly, she had no choice but to keep checking.

Here is what made this situation easy to miss.

Nothing was broken. The work was moving (albeit rather slowly). The relationship between the two leaders was genuinely strong. The CEO was engaged and committed.

From a distance, it looked like healthy cross-functional collaboration.

But the cost was real. It was just invisible in the places organizations typically look for it.

It wasn't showing up as conflict or missed deadlines. It was showing up as the quiet, steady drain on the focused capacity of the people who should have been accelerating the work.

What's underneath it rarely announces itself loudly. It accumulates in the coordination overhead, in the decisions that require two conversations when they should require one, in the momentum that builds more slowly than it should.

The leaders closest to the gap absorb the cost. And they do it with professionalism and care, because that is what committed leaders do inside systems that haven't given them what they need to move cleanly.

The CEO in this story was not disengaged. He was not the obstacle. He was leading with the same commitment as everyone else in the room.

What the retreat surfaced was simply this. There was a question only he could answer. And until he answered it, two of his strongest leaders would keep finding each other before every cross-functional decision, doing the work of clarification that should have been done at the decision architecture level.

So here is what I'd ask you to consider, not as a hypothetical, but as a real question about your own leadership team right now.

When you last named an owner, did you also define where their authority ended?

Not in general terms. Specifically. Across functions. In the places where their work and someone else's work meet.

Because capable, committed leaders don't stall because they lack confidence or competence.

They stall because the system never told them how far they could go.

Until Next Sunday,

Shawnette Rochelle, MBA, PCC
Founder, Excellence Unbounded
Decision Alignment for Executive Teams

If you’re curious to learn more about my work with executive teams, you can find it here.

If you want to have a conversation to learn more, schedule it here.