You changed something. Why are you back where you started?

You changed the structure, or you changed how you lead, and within a month it was back.

Why fixing one half keeps rebuilding the other.

They’ve restructured, or delegated, or worked hard on how they lead. For a few weeks something shifted.

Then it came back.

You’ve probably tried at least one of these.

You changed the structure

Promoted someone into the layer below you. Split the remit. Gave the regional teams ownership of their own markdown decisions. Made it clear who was responsible for what.

For a while, it worked.

Then the decisions started coming back. People checked with you before committing. Meetings you’d stepped away from found their way back into your calendar.

You wondered whether the team was ready.

But perhaps you were still looking at the range before they did. Asking for updates on things you’d handed over. Stepping in when you could see a better answer.

You hadn’t meant to undermine anyone. You were accountable for the outcome, and old habits are hard to break.

And none of it was unreasonable at the time. Every time you stepped in there was a good reason. A deadline, a customer, a number that didn’t look right. The problem isn’t any single one of those. It’s what thirty of them in a quarter teach the people around you.

Because the structure you wrote down and the structure you behaved were not the same structure.

People respond to the second one.

You changed yourself

Or perhaps you went the other way.

You stopped needing to have every answer. Started asking better questions. Got more comfortable with people making decisions you wouldn’t necessarily have made yourself.

You changed how you handled difficult conversations. How you responded under pressure. How much control you needed.

And you meant it.

But the team still lacked some of the capability you needed.

Your boss still expected you to approve decisions you’d tried to hand over.

The meetings, the reporting lines and the escalation routes hadn’t changed.

So when things got difficult, you stepped back in.

Not because you’d failed to change. Because the environment around you hadn’t changed with you.

And gradually, the old way returned.

Why neither attempt stuck

Change the structure and keep operating the same way, and you will rebuild the structure you were trying to replace.

Not deliberately.

You’ll just keep making the small calls that tell people where the decisions really sit.

Change how you lead and leave the structure alone, and the job will pull you back.

Not immediately.

On the first difficult week.

Whichever one you fix, the other one is still there, undoing it.

Which one is yours

This isn’t an argument that both sides are equally broken.
Usually one of them is pulling harder.

For some leaders, the environment is the bigger problem.

They’re capable and ready to operate differently, but the structure around them makes it close to impossible.

For others, the structure is reasonably well set up, but their own habits keep rebuilding the thing they’re trying to escape.

The difficulty is knowing which part needs attention.

Sometimes you change the structure because it’s easier than examining your own behaviour.

Sometimes you work on yourself because you don’t have the authority to change the organisation around you.

So you work on what’s available.

And what’s available is rarely the whole problem.

Why it’s hard to see from the inside

Both explanations are true at the same time, and both are always available to you.

In a week where the team misses something, the capability explanation is right there. In a week where you catch yourself answering a question you’d already handed over, the behaviour explanation is right there.

Whichever one you happen to be looking at will look like the whole problem.

And you have no neutral view of your own behaviour, because you were present for every decision and each one made sense when you made it.

That isn’t a failure of self-awareness. It’s what being inside something does.

Andrew

PS. The difficult part is working out which half you’ve been able to see because you are right in the middle of it. This is where the conversation from someone outside the organization usually helps.