Read time: 3.4 min.

{{First Name | My friend}},

Have you ever given someone a title that came with a ceiling they didn't know was there?

It's a question most leaders won’t ask out loud. Because asking it means sitting with the possibility that the ceiling wasn't an oversight. It was a design choice.

Design choices like that don't always look like choices.

They form inside transitions that look complete. The structure is documented. The domains are defined. The transition is handled with care. And the person who shaped the handoff had both the authority to define it and a clear stake in where it ended.

Earlier this year, Workday illustrated what this can look like.

In February 2024, Carl Eschenbach became sole CEO of Workday. The transition was deliberate and well-structured. Aneel Bhusri, co-founder, controlling shareholder, and the person who had led the company for nearly two decades, moved into the executive chair role.

The domain split was documented in Workday's own official announcement. Bhusri would remain particularly focused on advising the business on innovation and the future direction of Workday's applications and technology platform.

Read that again. The domain assigned to the executive chair's advisory role was the domain that would define whether Workday survived the AI era. That's not a coincidence. That's a boundary.

The formal authority transferred. The gravitational authority did not. Gravitational authority doesn't get announced. It's the weight that comes with two decades of founding a company, holding the majority of its voting power, and never fully stepping back from what you built.

Eschenbach held the title. Bhusri held the domain that mattered most. Oh, and he was still in the room.

What that meant in practice was that Eschenbach's authority as CEO had a ceiling. And the ceiling was shaped, at least in part, by the authorities Bhusri retained as executive chair and the advisory domain he continued to hold.

Two years later, when Bhusri returned as CEO, he explained that over the prior two years the AI strategy had not been clear.

He was the executive chair during those two years. Product and innovation were his documented domain. He was present. He was engaged.

And the strategy he was responsible for advising on didn't move the way it needed to.

That surfaces a question any sophisticated reader is already sitting with: if the strategy wasn't moving, and the person advising on strategy was also the controlling shareholder and incoming CEO, who actually owned that decision?

I'm not going to answer it. But I'd encourage you to sit with it.

At Workday, whatever their answer was, it didn't surface as a governance failure or a visible breakdown. It accumulated quietly, inside the normal friction of execution. And when it surfaced, it looked like what these things tend to look like: a strategy that didn't move the way it needed to.

The Workday situation is a public one. The dynamics are unusually visible. But the condition it reveals is not unusual at all.

Sometimes the question is whether your team has clear ownership. And sometimes you already know the answer is yes. That's the invitation to go one level deeper.

At Workday, ownership was clear. Eschenbach owned the CEO role. Bhusri owned the executive chair role. What wasn't clear was how far each one's authority actually reached when the decisions that mattered most required it. When those two things aren't aligned, execution pays the price.

For Workday, the cost showed up in a strategy that stalled, a stock that lost more than half its value from its 2024 peak, and a leadership transition that returned power to the same person whose role had helped shape the conditions that created the structural ambiguity.

Given the title and the conditions around it, where does authority actually begin and end?

At Workday, that question had a documented answer. It still wasn't enough. The formal structure was clear. The gravitational one wasn't. And in the space between those two things, the most consequential decisions in the company's history didn't have a clean home.

The documented answer and the operating reality were two different things. That distinction is worth examining in your own organization before your next major initiative requires it.

If you'd like a thought partner as you explore this issue, I'd welcome a conversation. You can schedule time directly here.

Until Next Sunday,

Shawnette Rochelle, MBA, PCC
Founder, Excellence Unbounded
Decision Systems 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.