Every organization has two org charts. One is on the shared drive. The other is real, and nobody drew it.
The documented chart says a manager approves scheduling, a director signs off on spend, and issues escalate one level at a time. The real routing says everyone checks with the same person first, because she is the only one who knows whether it is actually fine.
The second chart is not a failure of discipline. It formed because the first one left questions unanswered, and work does not wait for an org chart to be updated.
Four signs authority has rerouted
The meeting after the meeting
A decision is made in the room, and then two people talk in the hallway and something different happens. That second conversation is where the real authority sits. It is worth paying attention to who is always in it.
Approval that is technically not required
Someone has the authority to decide but checks anyway. Ask why and the answer is usually some version of "it is easier than being wrong." That tells you the threshold was never written, so people are managing risk by seeking cover.
Escalation that depends on relationships
Problems reach leadership through whoever happens to know someone, rather than through a route. This works while the organization is small enough that everyone knows everyone, and quietly fails the moment you hire past that point.
New people asking who to ask
A new hire spends their first weeks learning the informal map, because the formal one does not predict outcomes. If your onboarding requires someone to explain who really decides things, you have documented evidence that the chart is wrong.
This is not a people problem
It is tempting to frame rerouted authority as overreach on one side or avoidance on the other. Someone is a bottleneck. Someone else will not step up.
Almost always, both behaviours are rational responses to an unclear structure. If the cost of a wrong decision is high and the threshold for making it is undefined, checking first is the sensible choice. If people keep bringing you decisions and there is no named alternative owner, answering them is the sensible choice. Both people are doing the reasonable thing inside a design that never specified the boundary.
Which is why telling people to stop is ineffective. The behaviour returns within a fortnight, because the condition that produced it is still there.
What actually moves it
Authority moves when three things get written down, not when someone is told to delegate more.
- The decision itself. Named specifically. Not "spending" but "single purchases under a stated amount from an approved supplier." Vague categories cannot be delegated because nobody knows where they end.
- The threshold. The line where it stops being this person's decision and becomes someone else's. A number, a category, a risk level. Without a line, everything is potentially an exception, and exceptions travel upward.
- What happens when it goes wrong. This is the one that gets skipped and the one that determines whether the delegation is real. If the answer is unclear, people assume the worst and route around their own authority to be safe.
Why this matters more as you grow
Informal routing is efficient at small scale. When eight people share context, checking with one another is faster than any documented process, and organizations get quite far on it.
It breaks in three specific situations: when headcount grows past the point where everyone knows everyone, when work spreads across sites or time zones, and when you try to replicate the model somewhere else. All three remove the shared context the informal routing was running on.
That is why authority problems tend to surface during expansion rather than before it. The structure did not get worse. The conditions that were compensating for it disappeared.
Where does authority actually sit?
Five questions about decisions, not about people. Answer for a normal week.
Where this goes next
A short diagnostic surfaces a pattern. An operational audit tests it against how the organization actually runs, across leadership, the team and the records, then sequences what to address first. What follows the audit depends on what the findings justify, which is why the service ladder starts after the diagnosis rather than before it.
If replication is the reason you are asking, franchise readiness is the version of the audit built for that decision.
Writing about what the work reveals before an organization asks itself to carry more.