Two leaders asked me to carry their reorganization cases up the chain this week. Why I declined both, and why the refusal did more coaching than any case I could have delivered for them.
Twice in one week, two different leaders brought me a reorganization proposal and asked, in effect, whether I’d carry it upward. Each had done real thinking. One had a diagnosis I found genuinely sharp: his pillar’s strategy had too many disparate objectives because the strategy had been built around the squads he happened to have, instead of the squads being built around the strategy he needed. ↑ Read that twice, because it describes half the org charts in our industry.
I’ve written before that org follows strategy (Issue 08, for readers keeping score), and both proposals got that reminder: changing your strategy is allowed and even encouraged, but write it down as an explicit document and get an actual yes from the executives who own the surrounding tradeoffs before a single box moves. This piece is about the other half of my answer, which turned out to matter more. I declined the courier job.
Arguments lose fidelity in transit. I would deliver a slightly wrong version of a case I only mostly hold, to a decision-maker who deserves the original.
Bring the view directly to the chief product officer. Make the argument in your own voice, with your own document, to the person who owns the decision. Partly this protects the argument itself, because a secondhand case gets the emphasis subtly wrong and can’t answer the follow-up question that actually decides things. Mostly, though, it’s because a leader at that level needs the direct channel more than they need this particular decision to go their way. One of the two, I noticed, had no recurring one-on-one with the chief product officer at all. That gap tells you more about the organization than any chart does, and closing it will outlast whatever we decide about the squads.
There’s a version of managing where playing courier feels generous. You have the relationship, you have the access, you can save your leader the exposure. I’ve done it, and it usually helps in the moment and costs in the year. Every case I carry teaches the organization that the path to the decision-maker runs through me, which makes me a bottleneck at best and a filter at worst, and it denies my leader the rep of standing behind their own thinking in the room where it counts. Sponsorship means opening the door and vouching for whoever walks through it, not walking through it for them.
So the fuller principle, one week later: strategy first, in writing, argued by its owner, decided in daylight. My job is the introduction, the rehearsal if they want one, and the endorsement once they’ve made their case. The envelope stays in their hands.
The teachable part
When someone routes their case upward through you, hand it back with a door held open. The direct channel to the decision-maker is worth more than any single decision it carries.