The cliché about things being more than the sum of their parts is often true. But when organizational distortion or dysfunction is present, it can hide what is actually happening — and not out of malice or incompetence; quite the opposite.
Organizations are systems. Systems protect themselves. Change is often experienced as a threat, even if when it is logically sound, and even when one person is experiencing both.
Overriding the innate human desire for control requires practice — and that might sound contradictory, because isn't governance a form of control?
Well, yes, and no.
Governance is a form of structure. Some people experience structure as controlling.
It isn't when it is implemented well. (Think scaffolding on a building being renovated, not barbed wire outside a prison.)
Structure, when done well, gives an organization, and all its employees and stakeholders, something to lean on.
No single person is responsible for carrying everything on their shoulders. No single team or department has to have all the answers, or make up for the team that doesn't seem to have any.
When structure fails, the experience of that for individuals inside the organization varies by function, title, and authority.
The more conscientious you are, the more you will be inclined to close the gap. Executing on authority one doesn't actually have comes with risks for both the conscientious party and the organization. That's effectively unrecognized infrastructure that implies capacity that does not exist.
Function and title are largely irrelevant for the mechanism to fire, but the risk can shift based on the person's perceived authority. One way to assess this is to ask if your people are making the decisions, or if the roles are.
Even at the lowest level this can be confronting, because in the moment it looks like doing a good job — answering questions, closing gaps, routing work. But that is the work of structure, not humans, and it is not sustainable for humans to maintain.
For leadership, when structure fails it can be rather confronting. When fixes don't work and explanations don't hold, the issue is often deeper. Operations may look or seem one way, and be inadvertently incentivized for the opposite underneath. Or incentives may be coherent, and the structure may not match reality.
Either way it is hard to see the water you're swimming in.