The City of Los Angeles has perhaps the clearest example of an approval process that was designed to fail. Placing a single bus shelter within city limits requires sign-off from nine different entities: the local councilmember; the city bureaus of Street Services, Engineering, Street Lighting, and Contract Administration; its departments of Planning, Public Works, and Transportation; and the city police department. If adjacent property owners object to a shelter, yet another agency, the Board of Public Works, is responsible for resolving the complaint.
In 2012, the city controller found that approving a shelter and issuing a construction permit took, on average, 4 months. Bus shelters were an innocent victim of legislative crossfire. When city councilors drafted a law regulating shelters, they classified them as “street furniture,” just like newsstands and public toilets. The toilets set off enormous controversy, resulting in a stringent approval process for all street furniture, including bus shelters. – Steven Higashide, Better Buses, Better Cities
Once (just once?) my team was tasked with a project we didn’t really want to do. I think in this instance we had to run some webinar for some partnerships or sales team, and the whole thing was not all that well conceived but too far along to stop. Because we never did this type of work, the project involved vetting and acquiring a webinar tool, figuring out how lead share/signups would work, and coordinating with our marketing announcements using muscles we didn’t have — all ultimately without particularly high potential for impact.
But it wasn’t our choice, and at first the person running the program on my team came and asked me about every little thing — is X date or Y date better, what do you think of these three tools, should I talk to [person] or [other person] — until finally we had an explicit conversation about how approvals would work. He said “I’m trying to figure out what you want.” I said, smiling, jokingly, gently, but still serious “what I want is to never hear about this again and have it go perfectly.”
He laughed. I laughed. And then it did.
In fact, it didn’t just go perfectly. Two months later, COVID swept the world and webinars were all the rage. And because of the excellent work this person had done, we were poised to run a weekly webinar series right out the gate — collecting thousands of new leads and tons of repurposable evergreen content at a time when no one was sure if we’d ever see the sun outside of a fuzzy Zoom background.
Great teams, unlike Los Angeles, don’t have to go through rigorous approval processes for every little decision. And a great manager probably doesn’t want you to come to them with everything. My phrasing was blunt but it was also direct for a reason — in a lot of cases, I want things to go perfectly and not touch them at all.
And yet…how do you know?
How do you know what sort of approvals to bring to your manager and what your manager would rather not see? Growth in your career comes from solving problems instead of doing tasks, but some step of the problem needs signoff. What’s the balance between getting approvals on the right things and badgering your manager with questions?
3 questions that help you know when to get approval (or when to forge ahead)
3 questions:
What’s the scale?
How tightly does this map to the core business?
How reversible is this decision?
Questions 1 and 2 are related. What’s the scale — meaning, how much stuff does the decision you’re asking about affect? If there are multiple systems, a ton of customers, or several projects tied up in a particular decision (maybe pricing, or external-facing language for an announcement), that probably needs approval.
How tightly does this map to the core business, e.g. what will this do to the money. A decision can affect the long-term business, like pricing, lifecycle, etc. or a decision can be immediate (what do I put in this email notifying customers of a price increase). The boss probably wants to see this.
Finally, how reversible is this decision? Sending an announcement is largely irreversible — you can issue a retraction, but you’ll never have not sent the announcement. Changing website copy is highly reversible.
This is not a perfect system.
Approvals are highly, highly organization- and manager-specific, and this is far from flowchart-level precision about when you should and should not look for approvals. You need to understand what people want (especially your boss), and every organization operates a bit differently.
And there are things that can make it even harder individually to forge ahead on your own. If you, like me, have been in environments where you could get brutally chastised for making a decision that didn’t somehow mindread exactly what the boss/client wanted, you might be hesitant to go out on a limb, and have some unlearning to do.
But as you look at your day-to-day work, the more you can shift towards autonomy, solving problems, and making the right decisions without being weighed down by approvals, the more you can get things done and grow in your career.
“The whole thing was not all that well conceived but too far along to stop.” That’s so real.
Also I’ve found that if you’ve had leaders in the past prone to micromanagement or large emotional reactions, you’ll seek to make your new leadership complicit at every step as a defense mechanism.
Phrasing like you’ve shared above is so helpful for navigating it.