The targets were missed. Again.
And right on cue, someone said, “The team didn’t step up.”
It’s a comforting explanation. Neat. Blameless. Slightly dramatic.
Also—almost always wrong.
Missed company targets rarely happen because people don’t care or aren’t working hard enough. If effort alone paid the bills, most companies would be crushing it by Q2. The real problem usually shows up much earlier, quietly, and without fireworks: unclear ownership in management.
Let’s talk about what actually happens inside growing companies.
Goals are announced with confidence. Numbers look ambitious but achievable. Everyone nods. Slides are approved. Then execution begins—and suddenly no one is fully sure who owns what.
Marketing assumes Sales will decide.
Sales waits for Operations.
Operations asks for approval.
Managers escalate instead of deciding.
And eventually, everything—everything—lands on the founder’s plate.
Not because the founder wants control.
Because someone has to decide.
When ownership isn’t explicit, accountability becomes fuzzy. People stay “involved” but not responsible. Tasks move forward, but outcomes don’t. Everyone contributes, but no one owns the final result. And when targets are missed, the post-mortem sounds like a group therapy session instead of a business review.
This is usually the moment leadership asks, “Why didn’t anyone flag this earlier?”
They probably did.
It just went up three layers.
Then sideways.
Then back up again.
By the time it reached the top, the window to act was already closed.
Decision escalation becomes the default behavior in many organizations—not because people are lazy, but because they’re unclear about authority. Managers stop deciding and start forwarding. It feels safer. No decision means no risk. No risk means no blame.
Until everything slows down.
And when everything slows down, the founder steps in.
That’s how founder bottlenecks are created—not from ego, but from structural gaps. When managers aren’t clearly empowered to decide, the founder becomes the safety valve. Pricing questions, hiring calls, strategy tweaks, operational issues—one by one, they pile up.
The company learns an unspoken rule: “If it’s important, wait for the founder.”
At that point, leadership teams often demand more urgency, more accountability, more “ownership mindset.” But mindset doesn’t fix a broken system. Clarity does.
Clarity on who owns which outcomes.
Clarity on which decisions should never be escalated.
Clarity on where responsibility truly sits when things go wrong.
Without that, missed targets will keep happening—and every quarter will feel like déjà vu.
The irony is most teams don’t fail because they lack talent. They fail because the system quietly trained them not to own, not to decide, and not to lead without permission.
When ownership is clear, decisions move faster.
When decisions move faster, founders step back.
When founders step back, leaders finally step forward.
And suddenly, missed targets stop being mysteries—and start becoming solvable problems.
If you can’t point to exactly where responsibility broke, you can’t fix it.
Too many companies have untrained leaders that fail. 