There is a recurring contradiction in many organizations—regardless of their size, idiosyncrasy, or whether they operate locally or globally—that is difficult to justify when examined with even a minimum of rigor.
Competent professionals are hired, with proven experience and, in theory, well suited to the position they are meant to fill. Their judgment is validated during the selection process, their background is trusted, and they are assigned a specific responsibility within the organization…
And yet, once inside, every step they take is scrutinized, operational decisions are questioned (regardless of their impact), and, in the worst cases, opinions are offered on areas in which—they are supposed to be—the experts.
Interventionism and the dilution of responsibility
This interventionism is rarely explicit or formalized and, therefore, will never appear in any corporate governance manual. It is a cultural inertia, a way of operating within the organization that becomes normalized over time and ends up affecting middle management with particular intensity, turning it into a permanent zone of friction between strategy and execution.
“The highest degree of interventionism usually targets middle management, which is extremely serious. Among other functions, this layer must act as the ‘transmission belt’ between strategy and execution. Interventionism ends up contaminating decisions and actions that are critical to any organization.”
If we do not trust the judgment of those who execute, why did we hire them in the first place? To follow detailed instructions? To validate decisions already made by others? Or simply to assume responsibility without real decision-making power?
When multiple hands intervene without assuming authorship of the decision, responsibility dissolves. With what legitimacy do we fire someone when we never allowed them to decide?
The trivialization of certain disciplines
This phenomenon is especially prevalent in disciplines whose superficial understanding is relatively “accessible”.
Marketing is the classic example. Because we are all exposed to campaigns, messages, ads, and seemingly simple concepts, a dangerous illusion is created: that we are all experts. The methodologies are “understandable,” the language is accessible, and the end result is visible, which opens the door to a common perversion—turning anyone into a supposedly qualified opinion-maker.
The same happens with e-commerce. Regularly buying from Amazon seems to automatically grant an implicit authority on how a website should be designed, how a checkout should be structured, or which functionality should be prioritized.
User experience gets confused with professional competence, and from there the “open bar” of ideas is activated. It rarely leads to anything good in the medium term.
This rarely happens in other areas of the organization. Tax, finance, or production lines carry a technical background that acts as a natural barrier against opinion-based interference. No one dares to tell a finance director how to structure a balance sheet or an engineer how to optimize a production line based on personal intuition.
In marketing or e-commerce, however, the boundary becomes dangerously blurred. The apparent accessibility of these disciplines works like a magnet: anyone observing from the outside feels an immediate impulse to intervene, as if superficial familiarity legitimized intrusion.
When giving an opinion means deciding (without assuming consequences)
There is a diabolical combination of three factors that can seriously erode teams and results and that, moreover, almost always comes as a single package.
- The trivialization of certain disciplines
- An interventionist inertia
- And a clear overestimation of our own capabilities end up leading to the usurpation of decision-making.
And this is where the damage starts to become serious.
Giving opinions is not harmless when hierarchy is involved. Will we politely say “no” to our direct superior and explain why the decision makes no sense? Or will we accept the change with a resigned “fine,” accompanied by the classic whisper from a third party: “accept it and they’ll shut up”?
The problem is that, at that point, responsibility begins to dissolve —a topic I already covered in a previous post. If we were forced to accept changes to the corporate website that we would never have made ourselves, who do we hold accountable when the results are poor?
We are not talking about “expected results,” because the person who gave in and accepted the change already knew—without verbalizing it—that it would not work. With what moral legitimacy can we evaluate the performance of someone we did not allow to decide?
As is often the case, it all starts with small gestures: “this should go here,” “change this over there,” “I’d do it differently.” Those who opine most forcefully are almost always the first to step aside when things start to go wrong.
The right to make mistakes
People in positions of responsibility must be allowed to act, execute and, yes, make mistakes.
“The middle management is not merely an administrative layer; it functions as the operational link that turns the strategy defined by the Executive Management into concrete decisions and actions.”
Without real autonomy, that role becomes hollow.
The mistakes made at this level will rarely sink an organization. And if they did, the problem would not be the mistake itself, but the fact that the person should never have held that position in the first place. And the responsibility for that does not lie with them, but with whoever hired them—an argument that is usually unassailable.
Clear accountability and a defined framework for action. Without that, no learning is possible.
Learning implies risk
Mistakes are an intrinsic part of learning, both in corporate life and in life itself, and should not be systematically avoided or penalized.
A good professional will always accumulate far more successes than failures, and it is precisely from the latter that, more often than not, things are discovered that were previously unknown.
Preventing teams from making mistakes does not make them more efficient; it makes them more dependent, more defensive, and far less accountable. And in the medium and long term, the cost of that culture is far higher than that of any isolated mistake that was never allowed to happen.
