Example: Untangling Decision Rights After Three Years of Headcount Growth

A commercial real estate services firm that had tripled headcount in three years discovered that its approval processes had not scaled with it, and a routine vendor approval that should have taken a day or two was taking closer to two weeks.

Background

The firm provides property management and leasing services to institutional landlords, and had grown quickly through a combination of new client wins and expanded scope on existing accounts. Headcount had roughly tripled over three years, from a tight team where the two founders personally approved almost everything, to an organization of over 120 people spread across five regional offices. The approval processes, however, had never been formally revisited since the founding days.

A structure that outgrew its own org chart

On paper, the org chart still showed a fairly simple approval hierarchy. In practice, a routine vendor approval, the kind that happens dozens of times a month, was informally passing through five different people before it could move forward, several of whom had accumulated review authority through ad hoc exceptions added after specific past incidents rather than through any deliberate design. Nobody had decided this should be the process. It had simply accumulated, one reasonable-sounding addition at a time, until an eleven-day average approval time became normal enough that new hires assumed it had always worked that way.

Mapping how decisions actually happened, not how the chart said they should

Before proposing any fix, we spent two weeks tracing a sample of recent approvals end to end, interviewing everyone who had actually touched each one, not just the people the org chart listed as owners. The real pathway looked meaningfully different from the documented one: several nominal approvers had quietly been delegating to a deputy for months without it ever being formalized, while other steps that appeared mandatory on paper were, in practice, being skipped entirely by people who had learned they could route around them.

A reporting-line redesign, not a reorganization

The fix did not require a full reorganization, new titles, or anyone changing desks. It required making explicit, in writing, who actually owned each category of decision, removing the redundant review steps that had accumulated without ever solving the problem they were meant to address, and setting a clear escalation path for the genuinely unusual cases that legitimately needed a second set of eyes. The people doing the approving mostly stayed the same. What changed was that everyone, including the approvers themselves, finally had a shared, accurate picture of who was actually supposed to decide what.

Results

Average time to close a routine vendor approval fell from eleven days to two, and the firm’s regional office leads reported a noticeable drop in the informal workarounds staff had developed to route around the old process, workarounds that had themselves been introducing inconsistency into how vendors were evaluated.