Insight Inclusive leadership and management practices
A title gives you a responsibility. Not necessarily the right to act.
The org chart says who is accountable. Daily life reveals who can actually decide without asking permission.
THE OBSERVATION
Two people, the same title, two different latitudes.
In the same organization, two people holding exactly the same title do not always have the same ability to act. One decides and informs afterwards; the other prepares a case and waits for approval. One adjusts a working method for someone who has just arrived; the other applies the procedure and reports the case.
Asked about it, both will describe the same role, with the same official responsibilities. And they will be right: it is the same role. What differs is not written down.
Responsibility is assigned. Permission is learned.
HOW A PERMISSION TAKES HOLD
It is inferred from what happened last time.
No one receives a document setting out how far they can go. Everyone learns it through experience: a decision taken without consulting that drew no comment, another one taken back over in a meeting, an initiative met with “next time, run it by me first”. Three episodes are often enough to fix a boundary for years.
That mechanism is effective and silent. It requires no particular intention on the manager's part: it is enough that they react. And since they react according to their own comfort at that moment — their workload, their stress level, their relationship with the person — two members of the same team can learn different boundaries without anyone intending it.
WHY THIS MATTERS IN A DIVERSE SETTING
Not everyone reads the signals the same way.
Inferring a permission from a silence, a raised eyebrow or a polite turn of phrase assumes shared codes. Someone who has come from another workplace, another country, another sector, another professional generation does not necessarily read those signals as they were sent.
Some will read the absence of comment as approval, others as a simple delay. Some will assume you never decide without informing your supervisor, others that waiting would show a lack of initiative. The result is not an attitude problem: it is a difference of interpretation about a boundary no one ever stated.
That is one reason why making decision boundaries explicit is, in practice, one of the highest-return moves in a diverse organization. It costs almost nothing and removes a source of errors that had until then been attributed to individuals.
WHAT CAN BE CLARIFIED
Three categories are usually enough.
What the person decides alone and does not have to announce. What they decide alone but have to make known. What has to be discussed beforehand. Stated once, those three categories make visible most of what had until then been negotiated in silence.
What can I settle without asking, and how do I know?
A title organizes responsibilities. It says nothing about the right to act. As long as that right stays implicit, it will keep being distributed unevenly — without intent, but with very real effects.
This text goes deeper into one dimension of our expertise The full argument, the evidence and the possible forms of engagement are set out on the expertise page.
Inclusive leadership and management practicesCONTINUE
Other insights on inclusive leadership.
- Insight Inclusive leadership plays out where the work actually happens A policy can be common to the whole organization. Yet a team's experience of it is built in very local decisions.
- Insight Training managers is not enough A training room can open up awareness. On its own, it does not transform how a team is managed on Monday morning.
- Insight Leadership should not disappear when the leader leaves the room The test of transferable leadership often begins the moment the person who usually decides is no longer in the room.
- Insight The next big challenge for managers is already here Some responsibilities end up changing the very way people manage. Martin Lépine saw one take hold twenty years ago. He sees another one today.