Taking Back Control in a Crisis? Decide When You’ll Give It Back

The week a key hire quit mid-project, I took three routine calls back onto my desk “just until we stabilize.” Pricing exceptions. Vendor swaps. The weekly staffing puzzle. The crunch lasted about ten days. The habit lasted months.

I remember the quiet after more than the scramble. People stopped bringing recommendations. They brought questions. I had taught them, without meaning to, that judgment lived upstairs again.

Here’s my situation, so you know where I’m coming from. I run B:Side Capital, a mission-driven Small Business Administration (SBA) lender and certified community development financial institution (CDFI). I also teach management and entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business. Across those chairs I keep seeing the same pattern in restaurants, contractors, clinics and software shops: When pressure arrives, the owner becomes the decision system, and nobody writes the date when that arrangement ends.

Most owners treat a temporary grab of authority as common sense. It often is. Speed matters when consequences are coupled and information is thin. The failure is leaving the grab unnamed. Temporary control becomes institutional culture unless you define the evidence for returning decisions to their normal owners. Gallup finds that employees whose manager involved them in setting goals were nearly four times more likely to be engaged than others, yet only 30% of employees experience that basic expectation. Involvement dies first when every hard call routes back to one desk.

I used to treat the pull-up as proof I was carrying the load. Wrong lesson. Carrying the load can be necessary. Teaching the company that only you may decide is optional and expensive.

Name who owns each recurring call

Start with a blank page and the decisions that repeat every week. Pricing exceptions. Hiring offers inside a band. Vendor changes under a dollar threshold. Schedule swaps. Customer make-goods. Write who may decide, what they may trade and when the call must move up. Goals without owners are theater. Strategy becomes real the moment someone knows, without asking, whether the call is theirs.

At BodeTree, I finally did this after another stretch where every exception landed in my inbox. The map was ugly in its simplicity. Ambition had concentrated judgment in one person, and I had been calling that leadership.

The principle fits in one line: Decision rights are part of strategy, not an org-chart afterthought.

Try the same map this week. Pick five recurring calls. Put a name next to each. If your name appears four times, you have a concentration, whether you plan to grow or not. A restaurant owner might find the same person owns menu specials, vendor credits and the Saturday floor. A SaaS founder might find discounting, enterprise renewals and production access share one login. Name the owners while the room is still listening.

Write the escalation triggers with the authority

Delegation is incomplete until the person receiving authority knows when and how to return a decision upward. Local actors need room to act, and they also hit threshold changes the original mandate did not anticipate. An escalation path defines the triggers, the response time and what context must travel with the issue. Skip it, and you get silent overreach or habitual upward deferral. Both train the wrong muscle.

I fought writing triggers because they felt bureaucratic. They are a boundary, not a binder. Act here. Come back when one of these conditions changes: risk crosses the band, purpose conflicts, spend exceeds the limit or two teams need the same scarce resource.

The principle: Hand someone the return path with the authority.

Say the split plainly when you delegate. “You own this up to X. Escalate when Y. Bring the context, not just the question.” A franchisee can do that for a regional manager. A clinic owner can do it for billing leads. A fabricator can do it for shift supervisors. Keep one annoyance unresolved on purpose: the issue that always climbs because nobody knows whether it belongs downstairs. That gap is the curriculum.

Put an exit condition on every temporary pull-up

Crisis can justify concentrating authority. Comfort cannot. The moment you pull a decision upward, state what would let it move back down: a date, a restored capability, a risk threshold or an information flow that no longer needs your desk. Review observed capability against decisions people actually got to practice. Otherwise the exit test measures deprivation of opportunity as if it were incapacity.

I used to wait until things “felt normal” before returning calls. Feelings are a weak criterion. Normal never arrives cleanly. The temporary grip stays because returning authority requires a second act of courage: trusting judgment you recently starved.

The principle: A pull-up without an exit condition is a theory of leadership in disguise.

Test it this week. List every decision you reclaimed in the last quarter “just until we stabilize.” Write one sentence for each: what would justify giving it back, and who must explain if it stays with you. A retailer can stage a seasonal buy back to a buyer. A professional-services owner can return staffing puzzles to a lead. Ambition stays. The calendar gets a veto on permanent centralization.

Here’s where I’d start this week: Map five recurring calls to named owners, write escalation triggers beside each one and put a dated exit condition on every temporary pull-up still sitting on your desk. Say the return path out loud to whoever shares the risk with you.

The quiet after that quit still sits in my mind. People waiting for my nod was the real scoreboard. Write the exit condition when you take the call back, and judgment has somewhere to live again.

The week a key hire quit mid-project, I took three routine calls back onto my desk “just until we stabilize.” Pricing exceptions. Vendor swaps. The weekly staffing puzzle. The crunch lasted about ten days. The habit lasted months.

I remember the quiet after more than the scramble. People stopped bringing recommendations. They brought questions. I had taught them, without meaning to, that judgment lived upstairs again.

Here’s my situation, so you know where I’m coming from. I run B:Side Capital, a mission-driven Small Business Administration (SBA) lender and certified community development financial institution (CDFI). I also teach management and entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business. Across those chairs I keep seeing the same pattern in restaurants, contractors, clinics and software shops: When pressure arrives, the owner becomes the decision system, and nobody writes the date when that arrangement ends.