One of the principles I’m strict about when leading teams is that responsibility without authority is tyranny. If someone is accountable for an outcome, they must have the authority to make the decisions that shape it. Otherwise, you’re not delegating. You’re assigning blame in advance.

That principle gets uncomfortable in practice, because it means letting people make choices you wouldn’t have made yourself.

I ran into this a few years back when I hired a new Electrical Engineer for a greenfield project. One of his first major tasks was selecting the microcontroller.

The part he chose was not my first choice. In fact, I’d have described it as a hobbyist-grade MCU. Popular, accessible, well-supported, but not something I would instinctively reach for in a commercial product. There were other more apropriate choices on the market.

I went with his choice but I told him I had concerns, asked him to sanity-check the choice for any obvious gotchas, and then I let him proceed.

The moment that raised eyebrows

Later, the CEO asked me why I hadn’t overruled the decision if I thought it was a poor choice. From the outside, the situation looked irrational: the more experienced engineer disagreed with the selection, knew the risks, and still allowed it to go ahead.

It can be summarised by this principle: it’s more important to have a motivated employee than a perfect product.

That one decision signalled something very clearly to the new hire: this wasn’t a role where he was expected to follow instructions and absorb blame. It was a role where he owned outcomes.

Ownership changes behaviour

The moment the decision became his, his behaviour changed.

He didn’t just implement the design. He defended it. He stress-tested it. He read errata. He dug through forums and datasheets late at night. He cared about making it work properly because it was his call.

When problems came up -and of course they did- there was no shrugging and no quiet resentment. There was no “well, this is what I was told to use.” There was only a strong desire to solve the problem and stand behind the result.

If I had overridden the choice and imposed my preference, the dynamic would have been completely different. Every issue would have been “the CTO’s part choice.” The incentive would have been to do the minimum required to make the noise go away, not to deeply understand the system and improve it.

Authority creates accountability; control destroys it

This is the part a lot of leaders miss. Control feels safe because it reduces variance. It gives the illusion of quality control. But it also strips people of the psychological ownership required to care deeply about the outcome.

You can have:

  • a slightly imperfect technical choice with a motivated, invested engineer, or
  • a technically optimal choice with someone mentally disengaged and covering themselves

The second option produces fragile systems and quiet mediocrity. The first produces resilience.

Yes, the decision had costs

Did that microcontroller choice cause issues? Yes. Were there quirks, limitations, and trade-offs that had to be worked around? Absolutely.

Did the business survive? Yes. Did the product ship? Yes. Did customers care what microcontroller we used? Not even remotely.

What they cared about was whether the product worked, whether issues were fixed quickly, and whether the team took responsibility when things went wrong.

They never asked about the datasheet.

Sometimes you still need to veto

You need to trust your people or fire them. The time to correct the decision is either through up front coaching, training, or in the choice validation phase. Let them build a prototype and ask the right questions to reveal the shortcomings of a given choice.

Taking their decision and then just going “No, you’re wrong. We’re doing it my way.” is a sure way to demotivate the person -especially when it’s their domain- and doesn’t allow you to develop the skills that would lead to a better decision in the future.

Perfect products are less valuable than strong teams

A lot of leadership mistakes come from optimising for technical perfection at the expense of human systems. But products are not built by architecture diagrams. They’re built by people, under pressure, over time.

A team with real ownership will compensate for imperfect decisions. A team without ownership will fail even with perfect ones.

If you want people to act like owners, you have to let them make decisions that matter. That includes letting them make decisions you wouldn’t have made yourself.

Authority and responsibility are inseparable. Remove one, and the other becomes theatre.