“Do as I say”
“Shortly after joining as the new CMO, the CEO asked me to fire several people from my new team. I had only been there a couple of weeks and still hadn’t had time to ‘size him up,’ so I couldn’t know for certain what was behind that request, but I had the sense that what he was really trying to do was see if I was willing to make difficult decisions.”
A colleague shared this story with me a few months ago. He had just joined a mid-sized (under 50 employees) but highly dynamic organization, with an apparently competent team, and his priority was to understand the context before making a single move.
However, barely a few weeks in, the CEO presented him with a challenge that felt more like a test than an immediate business need. And he, who had joined precisely to bring rigor and judgment, quickly realized that it wasn’t about people or structure, but about assessing whether he could take responsibility as an executive, even when the decisions were uncomfortable.
Joint Decisions?
In many organizations, there is a widespread belief that decisions should be participatory, consensus-driven, and, in a sense, “democratic.”
The idea can sound appealing because it conveys openness, inclusion, and modernity, but when applied without discernment, it often produces the opposite effect: a gradual loss of rigor and structural confusion over who should ultimately take responsibility.
This creates a difficult contradiction to justify: why invest so much in attracting top professionals if, once they join, we tell them what to do and subject their decisions to a permanent assembly-like process?
The problem is not participation itself, which is valuable and necessary. Opening conversations during exploratory phases, sharing perspectives, or analyzing risks from multiple angles usually enriches understanding of the context and helps make more informed decisions.
“One thing is to encourage debate, and quite another is to hand over the final decision to a collective mechanism trying to reconcile every viewpoint.”
The Cost of Decisions Conditioned by Too Many Criteria
When too many actors are involved, decisions tend to be shaped by inconsistent criteria, reflecting diverse interests and partial perspectives on the problem. The result is timid, unambitious outcomes that, ultimately, cannot be attributed to anyone.
Decisions cannot be the product of trying to balance internal sensitivities; they require clear authorship. If a CMO must incorporate the opinions of the CFO, the CEO, the Head of Operations, the Sales Director, and the Board—sometimes even from people who do not fully understand the nature of the problem—their room to act as an expert is drastically reduced, often disappearing entirely.
The inevitable question arises: if we tell them exactly what to do, why did we hire them in the first place? How can we hold them accountable for results if the decisions were never truly theirs?
The CEO’s Silent Test
This phenomenon also tends to trigger distrust dynamics within senior management. Many CEOs—especially those managing senior teams—pay close attention to how a new CMO or CFO reacts when the CEO decides to “probe” a decision in their area.
“It’s not a power struggle, but a way to evaluate whether the executive has independent judgment and the determination to defend it.”
When a professional with functional responsibility accepts an intrusion affecting the core of their role without question, the signal they send is concerning: either they don’t know how, they don’t want to exercise leadership, or they don’t dare to.
Any of these options calls into question their ability to lead the area. Paradoxically, in these cases, the CEO often concludes that the executive is not reliable—not because they challenge authority, but because they fail to defend their own.
The Problem Isn’t the C-Level, It’s Who Hired Them
It is worth remembering that if a C-level executive is genuinely not suited for the role, the problem does not lie with them, but with those who hired them. A CEO who repeatedly makes poor hiring decisions compromises the coherence of the executive team and, consequently, the strategic health of the organization.
This is why it is so contradictory to hire experts and then prevent them from exercising their judgment. If we don’t trust the judgment of the people we bring in, either we have hired poorly, or we are not prepared to delegate. Ultimately, the error always flows upward.
No CEO can maintain credibility if they persist in selecting the wrong profiles or bring in experts only to prevent them from doing their work.
Organizations Should Not Be Democracies, but Systems of Responsibility
All of this leads to a fundamental idea: organizations cannot operate as assembly-style democracies; they must function as systems of responsibility.
“Being ‘democratic’ in a business context means listening, contrasting perspectives, and allowing people to provide information—not co-managing strategic decisions that require clear roles and individual accountability.”
Debate can be collective; decisions cannot. When responsibility is diluted among many, execution may lose strength, but the bigger problem is that no one can be held accountable for what happens next.
This is why true organizational maturity does not consist of making decisions collectively, but in ensuring that every decision has a legitimate owner who can exercise judgment without unnecessary interference, assume the consequences, and has the authority to see it through to the end.
