I spent years trying to make myself legible enough to authority.

Then I became the authority.

I keep coming back to that because gaining authority changed my understanding of what authority is for.

I know what it is like to be capable and unconventional and need room to work.

I know what it is like to see a connection before I can explain every intermediate step. I know the exhaustion of translating my reasoning for someone who needs to understand exactly how I arrived somewhere before they will allow me to proceed. I know what it feels like when difference in method is interpreted as lack of judgment.

So when I finally had positional authority, I didn't want to reproduce that.

I had spent a lot of my career assuming that if someone above me didn't understand how I was thinking, the burden was mine to keep explaining until they did.

Sometimes that was necessary. Sometimes I had context they didn't, or they had context I didn't, and explanation made the work better.

But sometimes the real requirement was simpler: my reasoning had to become sufficiently similar to theirs before it could be trusted.

Those are not the same thing.

When I had authority myself, I started noticing how easy it would be to reproduce that dynamic. I could ask someone to explain a decision because I genuinely saw a risk they hadn't considered. Or I could ask because I wouldn't have done it that way.

Authority makes those two things dangerously easy to confuse.

This is not the same as having no standards.

I have high standards. Sometimes probably unreasonably high ones.

But I became interested in being very clear about the edges and giving people a lot of autonomy inside them.

What are we trying to accomplish? What constraints are real? What commitments have we already made? What information do you need? What decisions are yours? Where do I need to be involved?

Then: go.

Mary Parker Follett wrote about the distinction between "power-over" and "power-with" more than a century ago. I like the distinction because authority is real. Pretending hierarchy doesn't exist doesn't make it disappear. Someone can hire you, fire you, change your compensation, redirect your work, withhold information, approve your budget, or make a decision you cannot override.

The question isn't whether power exists.

It's what we do with it.

I used to think authority mostly meant having the responsibility to make good decisions.

Increasingly, I think one of the most consequential uses of authority is deciding who gets to decide.

If every meaningful choice has to travel upward, you haven't built a strong team. You've built a queue.

And if people have to continually prove that their reasoning matches yours before you trust them to act, you may have hired expertise only to make it imitate you.

The goal wasn't to understand everyone's reasoning so completely that I could have produced it myself. If that were the standard, I would only ever be able to trust people who thought like me.

I needed to understand enough to hold the edges: the outcome, the constraints, the commitments, the risks I was ultimately accountable for.

Inside those edges, their judgment needed room to actually be theirs.

Some of the best leaders I have worked for did something that felt almost radical: they got out of my way.

They didn't need to understand every boundary I crossed because they trusted that I was crossing it for a reason. They challenged me when it mattered. They asked questions. They gave me context I didn't have.

But they did not require me to make myself completely legible before I was allowed to be useful.

But they did not require me to make myself completely legible before I was allowed to be useful.

I tried to give that to my teams.

There is risk in this. Trust can be misplaced. Someone can make a decision you wouldn't have made. They can take longer. They can fail.

But eliminating those risks eliminates something else too.

Agency.

And I have become increasingly interested in the relationship between agency and responsibility. I don't think autonomy means doing whatever you want. It means having enough real authority to be responsible for an outcome rather than merely responsible for executing someone else's instructions.

That distinction matters.

If I tell you exactly what to do and you do it, I own more of the outcome than organizations often admit.

If I give you a goal, context, constraints, resources, and genuine decision-making authority, then you can actually exercise judgment.

Judgment requires practice.

So does leadership.

Maybe this is why my teams sometimes trusted me when I was moving across boundaries they couldn't completely see. It wasn't simply that they believed I had a grand plan. I hope it wasn't.

I think trust moved in both directions.

I was willing to hold enough of the surrounding architecture that they could concentrate on their work.

And they knew I would let them hold the parts that were theirs.

I spent years trying to make myself legible enough to authority.

When I became the authority, one of the most important things I could do was stop requiring complete legibility as the price of trust.