Reference reading
Domineeringness
Retaining control of every decision while making others responsible for the delay.
A persistent desire to control others that overrides their reasonable agency.
Imagine this: Every ordinary decision must return to the same desk, although the people doing the work already have the knowledge to make it.
How the pattern works
The approval desk guards a process it has brought to a halt. Oversight has a legitimate purpose: establish limits, coordinate dependencies and reserve decisions whose consequences require a wider view. Domineeringness treats that purpose as permission to retain every choice, including choices the responsible people could reasonably make.
A team may be told it owns a result while each minor adjustment still needs the executive’s personal assent. Responsibility travels downward; authority keeps returning upward. The leader can then interpret the delay as proof that the team needs still more supervision, although the organization has denied it the means to act.
What it costs the work
Attention is spent obtaining access to the controlling person rather than examining the work. Capable people stop exercising judgment where it will be overruled without a reason. The executive also loses the capacity to distinguish a consequential decision from a routine request for permission.
A distinction worth keeping
Delegation is not abandonment, and some decisions properly remain with an executive. Domineeringness concerns a desire for control that overrides reasonable agency. A clear standard or a justified refusal can preserve agency better than vague permission followed by repeated private intervention. The appropriate scope depends on competence, stakes and entrusted responsibility.
What a useful response can change
Match a named responsibility with the decisions needed to discharge it. Make the limits explicit: which commitments require consultation, what information must be shared and where the person can proceed.
Review a delegated decision through its reasons and consequences, rather than whether it resembles the choice the executive would personally have made. Otherwise delegation remains a request for imitation.
When an intervention is necessary, explain why the agreed boundary was insufficient and whether it should change. An emergency exception should not silently become the ordinary approval route.
Questions for reflection
- Which decision am I retaining for a reason beyond wanting it to remain mine?
- Can the person accountable for this result make the choices it requires?
Other perspectives
But the chairman of the Commission must have another and higher power—the power of uniting these conclusions with the conclusions of others, the power of using this material to evolve with others plans for action.
Mary Parker Follett · The New State · Read the source
In Follett’s account of collective inquiry, the chair’s additional contribution is to join conclusions into plans with others. Authority does useful work beyond collecting every permission.
The State, while it respects the liberty of each in what specially regards himself, is bound to maintain a vigilant control over his exercise of any power which it allows him to possess over others.
John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source
Mill is discussing public limits on power over others. The passage supplies a question about accountability for entrusted power, rather than a statement of current employment law.