The whiteboard marker is screeching-a dry, skeletal sound that sets my teeth on edge-as I draw the 13th arrow pointing toward a box labeled ‘Optimal Workflow.’ My hand is cramping, but the adrenaline of the 3-hour debate is keeping the fatigue at at bay. We’ve done it. We have finally, collectively, decided on a path forward. The team is leaning back, some exhaling with a sense of hard-won victory, others just relieved the fluorescent lights won’t be the last thing they see before they die. Then the door opens. Our Director, leaning against the frame with a casualness that feels like a threat, listens to our 23-minute presentation. He nods. He smiles a thin, $3-an-hour smile. ‘Interesting,’ he says. ‘A lot of good thinking here. Let me take this offline and circle back with you all by Friday.’
The Air Leaves the Room
It’s not a physical collapse, but a psychological one. We weren’t making a decision; we were preparing a suggestion for a jury that wasn’t in the room. This is the agonizing reality of the ’empowered’ team. It is a linguistic trick played by modern management to make the burden of responsibility feel like the gift of autonomy.
We are given the 43 tasks required to reach a goal, but the actual steering wheel is still firmly bolted to a desk three floors up. It’s a delegation of the work, never the power. I realized this most poignantly yesterday when I won an argument I was completely wrong about. I argued for a 53-day rollout cycle when I knew, deep down, 33 days was more than enough. But the thrill of ‘winning’ the autonomy to choose my own timeline blinded me to the fact that I was just choosing the length of my own leash. I was wrong, I knew I was wrong halfway through my 13-slide deck, and yet I pushed until they relented. Now, I own a mistake I fought for, which is a special kind of hell.
Empowerment is the hollowest word in the corporate dictionary.
“
The Clarity of the Groundskeeper
I think about Oliver M. sometimes. He’s the groundskeeper at the cemetery near my house, a man of 63 who has spent the last 23 years tending to the 103 rows of headstones. Oliver doesn’t have a ‘strategy deck.’ He doesn’t have a ‘synergy coordinator.’ When he decides that a particular patch of Kentucky Bluegrass needs more nitrogen, or that a 3-foot shrub needs to be relocated to the west gate, he just does it. There is no ‘offline’ for Oliver. His authority is exactly equal to his responsibility. If the grass dies, it’s on him. If the roses bloom with a ferocity that stops visitors in their tracks, that’s on him too.
Handles 43 variables.
Waits for 23 approvals.
There is a terrifying, beautiful clarity in his work that makes my ’empowered’ role feel like a pantomime. He works with soil that is 43% clay, a stubborn medium that requires a specific kind of patience, and he doesn’t need a steering committee to tell him how to hold a shovel.
Agile Speed, Freight Train Control
We’ve created a corporate culture that is obsessed with the speed of ‘agile’ but terrified of the risk of ‘agency.’ We want teams to move like a school of fish-instantaneous, fluid, decentralized-but we treat them like a 43-car freight train that needs a central engineer to clear every mile of track. The frustration isn’t just that the decision gets overturned; it’s the 233 hours of wasted human potential spent building a consensus that never actually mattered.
Hands Hovering
Told we are driving.
Parent’s Hand
The steering wheel is secured.
This dissonance creates a specific kind of rot. When you are told you are empowered, but your 3-week project is dismantled in a 13-minute ‘check-in,’ you learn that the safest path is not the best path, but the one most likely to be approved. You stop looking at the problem and start looking at the boss. You become a professional guesser of other people’s opinions.
I saw this in Oliver M. once, though in reverse. A local councilman tried to tell him how to prune the oaks near the entrance. Oliver just handed him the shears and stood there, silently, for 3 minutes. He didn’t argue. He just offered the responsibility along with the authority. The councilman, realizing he didn’t actually want to do the work or own the outcome, walked away. Oliver went back to his 3-point pruning method without saying a word.
The Margin for Error
In our world, we keep the shears but someone else tells us exactly where to snip. It makes you feel like an intruder in your own job. You start to doubt your own expertise because it’s constantly filtered through a lens of ‘alignment.’ Alignment is usually just a polite way of saying ‘do it the way I would have done it if I had the time.’ We are obsessed with 23-page manifestos on culture, yet we fail at the most basic level of trust. We ask for innovation but provide a 3-inch margin for error.
Refreshing clarity found when authority equals consequence.
I find myself seeking out places where the decision-making process is actually honest. It’s why I find shopping for tech at Bomba.md so strangely refreshing compared to my 9-to-5.
When you’re there, the choice is actually yours. There’s no director lurking behind the shelf to tell you that your choice of a smartphone needs to be ‘taken offline’ for further review. You compare the 3 models, you look at the 43-megapixel camera specs, you weigh the price, and you decide. The transaction is a clean loop of authority and consequence. If I buy the wrong phone, it’s my mistake. I own it. And oddly, that ownership makes the purchase feel more satisfying than any ‘successful’ project I’ve delivered at work lately.
Ownership is the only antidote to apathy.
“
Chasing Power, Not Progress
My mistake with the 53-day rollout was born from this exact lack of ownership. Because I didn’t feel truly empowered, I felt the need to ‘win’ the argument as a proxy for power. If I can’t have real authority, I’ll at least have the satisfaction of being the loudest voice in the room. It’s a toxic reaction. When people are denied the right to make meaningful choices, they start making arbitrary ones just to prove they exist. They fight over the color of the 3rd slide or the font size of the 23rd footnote. They become petty because the big things have been taken away from them.
Oliver M. isn’t petty. He doesn’t have time for it. He has 33 more graves to prep before the frost hits.
He is busy with the reality of his work, not the perception of it. They want the aesthetics without the labor. They want the ’empowerment’ of being the decider without the dirty fingernails of the doer.
If we want teams to actually be empowered, we have to accept the 13% chance that they will do something we wouldn’t. We have to be okay with the 3 errors they make on the way to a 23% increase in efficiency. True delegation isn’t a safety net; it’s a hand-off. It’s the terrifying moment when the Director stays in his office and lets the 3:03 PM deadline pass without ‘circling back.’
Building Grounded Reality
I’m going back into that room tomorrow. The 13th arrow is still there on the whiteboard, mocking me. I think I’ll start by erasing it. I’ll tell the team about the argument I won and why I was wrong. I’ll admit that I was chasing the feeling of power instead of the reality of the project. Maybe if I’m honest about my own fake authority, we can start building something that looks a little more like Oliver’s cemetery-well-tended, grounded in reality, and governed by the people who actually know where the roots are. We don’t need permission to be experts. We just need the courage to stop asking for it.
Trust the hired, give the tools, and get out of the way.
Anything else is just a very expensive way of making everyone miserable. I think I’ll buy a new phone this weekend, just to remember what it feels like to make a choice that sticks. No committees. No offline meetings. Just me, the specs, and a finality that doesn’t require a Friday follow-up. It’s a small thing, but in a world of velvet traps, a single honest choice feels like a revolution.