Authority is handed to a rival while the delegator privately encourages the rival's subordinates or stakeholders to obstruct the work or report back, so the rival fails in plain view.
An example
Full authority over warehouses and delivery went to the new chief operating officer of a meal-kit startup, hired from a large grocer a year after the company's first large funding round. The founder, who had run operations until then, announced the handover at an all-hands. The four warehouse managers had been hired by the founder in the company's first year. Within weeks they were sending their escalations to the founder, who answered them. Instructions from the chief operating officer were carried out in their most literal form, and problems reached the founder before they reached the chief operating officer. At the second board meeting, the founder presented a list of the chief operating officer's missteps, several of which the chief operating officer was hearing about for the first time. The chief operating officer asked to restructure the warehouse reporting lines, and the founder said it was too soon.
Why it works
Routing the obstruction through the rival's own team removes the actor's cost: the act is invisible, and blame falls on the person in the seat. The rival's output is degraded at the source, since subordinates withhold information or carry out instructions in their most damaging form, so whatever competence the rival has shows up as failure. Their costs climb as they spend energy on mysterious problems, while the information flowing back amplifies each misstep. Prior influence over the rival's people, an ambiguous mandate, and an organization that blames the visible owner without looking upstream make it possible.
The thinking behind it
Stanley Milgram Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974) argues that people acting under an authority they accept as legitimate come to see themselves as carrying out its wishes, and his variations suggest obedience falls when authority is divided or questioned; later archival work has questioned how some trials were run. Warehouse managers hired by the founder still treat the founder as the authority. Insisting, in front of team and founder, that escalations run through the new leader settles whose authority they act under.
Erving Goffman Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956) describes performance teams whose members share an interest in a show and keep contradicting facts in a back region. The handover at the all-hands is the front region; the escalations still flowing to the founder are the back region. Recording where escalations go, and when problems reached each person, makes the back region visible to the board.
Warning signs
Escalations from the delegate's team keep going to the person who delegated. Long-tenured subordinates on that team owe their careers to that person. Problems reach the delegator before the delegate. The mandate is vague. The delegator presents the delegate's mistakes to senior forums and resists changes to the team's structure.
How to defend yourself
Negotiate the conditions before you take the role. Choose your own direct reports, or at least approve them, and insist that escalations run through you; say so to the team and to the delegator in the same meeting. Ask for objective metrics on the assignment, agreed with your sponsor, so soft sabotage cannot be dressed up as your failure. If the pattern starts, record where escalations went and when you learned of problems. When an initiative fails, ask the post-mortem to review the support it received. Build direct relationships with the team's long-tenured people, since some will prefer to work for whoever holds the seat.
How a leader shuts it down
Let new leaders help select their immediate reports, and make escalation run only through the formal line. Give delegated assignments objective metrics from the start. Run post-mortems that look at the support a failed leader received as well as their decisions.