Rival departments receive an expansive new remit in public and no budget or headcount to deliver it, so the failure that follows looks like their own.
An example
Fresh from its first large funding round, a logistics-software startup held an all-hands where the chief revenue officer announced that customer success would "own the enterprise experience end to end," including onboarding for the twelve enterprise clients sales expected that year. The head of customer success had six people, all working with small accounts. Her request for nine more hires went into the finance plan, which the chief revenue officer controlled, and stayed "under review" for two quarters. Sales closed nine enterprise deals. Onboarding stretched to four months, two clients escalated to the chief executive, and the board deck listed customer success as the top risk to net retention. At the next all-hands the chief revenue officer said he had given the team every opportunity, and he proposed moving enterprise onboarding into sales.
Why it works
Announcing the remit as a vote of confidence makes the team's later diminishment cheap for observers to accept, since they watched it being given every visible opportunity. As deliverables slip and complaints pile up, backing the team looks worse, and each missed milestone makes defending it more expensive, because defenders start to look naive or complicit. Every individual move is defensible, since ambitious goals, tight budgets, and accountability all sound like good management, and the harm shows only where the mandate and the missing money meet. Underneath it are an actor who controls the resource line separately from the mandate, an audience that scores outcomes, and a team that cannot credibly refuse.
The thinking behind it
Jeffrey Pfeffer The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective (1978), by Pfeffer and Salancik, argues that whoever controls a critical, scarce resource gains power over those who depend on it. An executive who announces a mandate and also controls the headcount line holds the team's success in hand while appearing to give it the lead. Tying every mandate to an approved funding line before it is announced removes that power.
Lee Ross Ross's fundamental attribution error, from The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process (1977), is the tendency to judge people by their traits and overlook their situation. Observers who watched a team receive a public remit judge its missed milestones as its own failure, and the unapproved hiring request never enters the picture. Tracking that request in every update keeps the situation in view.
Warning signs
Your team's new remit is announced in public, with talk of giving the team the lead. The matching budget or headcount request is never approved, or stays under review, and the person who controls that line is the one who praised the mandate. Deliverables begin to slip on a timeline anyone could have predicted. Observers remember the opportunity the team was given and forget the resources it never got.
How to defend yourself
Document the gap publicly and as it happens, before deliverables slip, so the shortfall is in the record when results are judged.
- Reply to the announcement in writing with what the remit requires: people, budget, systems, and dates.
- Track the resource request in every update, with its status and who holds it, beside progress on the mandate.
- Scope down openly to what current resources can deliver, and say what will not be done.
- Put the gap in front of the audience that will score the outcome, such as the leadership team or the board.
Once failure is visible, the same gap sounds like an excuse, so raise it early.
How a leader shuts it down
Tie every new mandate to an approved funding line before it is announced. When one leader assigns the work and another controls the money, have both sign off on the plan together. When a team misses a new mandate, ask whether it ever received what the mandate needed.