The delegation was already written. It identified responsibilities and routes for decisions, and it appeared to give colleagues a workable basis for acting without me. During a rehearsal of a ten-working-day CEO absence in 2023, however, thirty-one of forty-six routine decisions stalled while people waited for my personal sign-off. The gap was not hidden in a complex policy debate. It lay between the authority described on paper and the permission people believed they needed in practice. That was an uncomfortable finding for the person at the centre of the habit.
It would have been easy to frame the result as a confidence problem among colleagues. I could have asked them to be more decisive, circulated the delegation again and made a stronger statement about empowerment. Those responses would have left my own conduct largely outside the account. People learn an organisation through consequences as well as documents. If a decision is formally delegated but routinely reopened by the CEO, asking for reassurance first may become a sensible adaptation. The organisation can then reward precisely the dependency its written arrangements say it wants to remove.
The forty-six decisions were routine matters in a defined rehearsal. They were not a sample from which we could estimate every future delay or judge every executive's capability. Thirty-one stalled decisions did not prove that all could safely have moved faster. Some might require better evidence or an appropriate escalation. The useful question was why personal approval had become the expected route even where formal responsibility already existed. We needed to examine that expectation without treating the count as a verdict on the people involved or a complete diagnosis of institutional resilience.
## The document and the habit can describe different organisations
A delegation describes a permitted relationship between a decision and a role. Daily behaviour teaches people how that relationship is likely to be received. A leader may say that a colleague owns a matter while continuing to invite an informal preview, offer a preferred answer or revisit a reasonable choice after the event. None of those interventions has to look dramatic. Together they can establish a second approval system that is difficult to see because it is conducted through conversations rather than formal signatures. The written authority remains intact while its practical use becomes conditional.
That does not mean a chief executive should withdraw from discussion or never challenge a delegated decision. Advice, coordination and accountability remain necessary. The distinction concerns what the discussion does to ownership. A colleague can seek another perspective while retaining responsibility for the choice. They can also seek a signal that makes the choice safe only because the CEO has effectively made it. I wanted us to notice which relationship we were creating, especially when my availability made the second route feel convenient. Convenience around one person is a fragile basis for an institution's capacity to act.
We funded eight weeks of delegation coaching and escalation practice at ₹64 lakh. The work did not erase reserved matters or redistribute professional mandates through a workshop. Underwriting, actuarial, claims, risk and other disciplines retained their respective authority. The exercise concerned how existing responsibility was understood and used, including the evidence a colleague needed and the circumstances that properly required escalation. It also required me to examine the interventions through which I had made extra approval seem normal. A stronger instruction would have been easier to issue than that examination, but less likely to explain the practical problem.
## An absence reveals more than a list of deputies
An absence rehearsal can be misunderstood as a search for someone to imitate the chief executive. A deputy is nominated, a list of signatures is handed over and the organisation hopes that ordinary work continues. That may address part of the requirement, but it can leave the underlying dependence unchanged. If every uncertainty still converges on a single replacement, the rehearsal has moved the bottleneck rather than examined it. The more useful inquiry asks which decisions belong with which roles and whether those roles have the evidence, relationships and usable authority to discharge them.
The quality of a decision also matters more than a simple closure count. A team could improve a speed measure by resolving matters prematurely or failing to recognise a proper limit. I would not want the response to our finding to become a competition to make every decision without consultation. Consultation can improve judgement without transferring ownership. Escalation can be correct when a matter exceeds a remit or reveals a conflict that requires another authority. The task is to make those distinctions understandable enough that people are neither waiting for unnecessary permission nor acting beyond the responsibility they hold.
Our funded programme was not proof of succession readiness. It did not establish that a named individual could carry the CEO role, that every future absence would be uneventful or that the institution had become independent of personal relationships. Those claims would require different evidence and continued assessment. The case retains the initial finding and the decision to work on it. I prefer that bounded account to a more satisfying narrative in which an eight-week intervention is credited with changing an entire culture. An institution's habits are observed over time, including when the leader returns and ordinary pressures resume.
## Changing the centre is part of delegation
The most revealing moment may come after an authorised colleague makes a defensible decision I would not have chosen. If I automatically reopen it because my preference differs, I teach the organisation to avoid that situation next time. Accountability does not require agreement with every choice, but it does require a fair distinction between a poor process, an exceeded mandate and a reasonable judgement within remit. A CEO who cannot tolerate the third category will continue to create demand for personal permission, however carefully the delegation is drafted.
That is why the work included my participation. I needed to be clearer about when I was offering advice, when a matter genuinely required my authority and when a colleague should decide. I also needed to support the stated arrangement consistently rather than reward those who found an informal route back to me. These are not promises that all tension disappears. They are practical conditions under which a role can mean what its formal description says. Without them, independence of action remains something the organisation requests while making it personally risky to exercise.
A board considering executive resilience can ask about these conditions without managing routine decisions itself. It can examine how management tests the use of authority, what the exercise reveals and how leaders respond to findings that implicate their own habits. The point is not to replace an executive bottleneck with a board bottleneck. It is to understand whether the institution has a credible way to act through the roles it has created. For me, the rehearsal made that question concrete: a signature on a delegation was the beginning of responsibility, not evidence that responsibility was already being used.