Welcome back to The Leadership Amplifier. I’m Jimmy Burroughes, and today I want to poke at something that might feel a bit uncomfortable if you’re an HR Director, a Head of OD, or a leader who owns the people or engagement budget for your team. Because on paper, things probably look pretty good. Your engagement scores are steady, maybe even trending up. You’ve rolled out leadership programmes, coaching, workshops, maybe a shiny new values campaign. People tell you they like the culture. And yet… your senior team is still firefighting. You’re still sat in meetings where decisions circle for weeks. Projects stall not because people don’t care, but because nobody is quite sure who’s actually allowed to decide. If that’s you, you don’t have a motivation problem. You have an execution design problem. Let me explain what I mean by that. In the military, when you head out to sea, you don’t just rely on “high morale” to get the ship to its destination. You need charts, clear roles, and absolute clarity about who owns which decisions when the weather turns. In most organisations I work with — especially in that 10 to 100 million range, complex operations, multiple sites — the charts are fuzzy. Senior leaders are holding decisions two levels too high. Managers aren’t clear where their authority starts and stops. Delegation sounds empowering, but the mechanics are missing. So people feel busy, they’re even engaged, but the system is structurally congested. That hidden friction shows up as delay, rework, endless escalation. And that hits margin, speed and growth — the stuff your board actually cares about. When I really dig in with leadership teams, the pattern underneath all of this is almost always the same: ambiguity. Ambiguity about who owns what work. Ambiguity about who decides what. Ambiguity about what “good” looks like in a role beyond some generic job description HR wrote three years ago. Engagement programmes can’t fix that, because they don’t change the underlying architecture of execution. You can’t scale a business by asking people to “try harder” inside a system that’s designed for dependency. You scale by redesigning where decisions sit, how work flows, and what authority people genuinely have. That’s where the ROLES framework comes in. ROLES is a really practical tool we use to turn vague role descriptions into concrete execution design. It’s a conversation guide that helps you and your leaders get crystal clear on five things: Responsibilities, Objectives and Outcomes, Leadership Limits and Latitude, Experience, Exposure and Education, and Support. Instead of assuming everyone understands their lane, you sit down and deliberately design it. Before you approve the next development programme or engagement initiative, you run ROLES conversations around your critical roles and recurring decisions. You make success, authority, and support explicit. Think of ROLES as your navigation chart. It doesn’t replace development, but it makes sure all that investment actually translates into flow — faster decisions, less rework, and senior leaders who are not dragged back into the weeds every time something moves. In the next chapter, I’ll break ROLES down and show you exactly how to use it to push authority down safely and cleanly. Let’s get really practical and walk through ROLES in plain language. This isn’t a theoretical model; it’s a conversation you have with a real human about a real job. R is Responsibilities. This is the core work someone actually owns. Not the twenty-bullet job description — the three to five big responsibilities that define the role. What must be done by this role, versus delegated? What are the non‑negotiable accountabilities? And how do those connect to team and organisational purpose? O is Objectives and Outcomes. Here we’re asking: what are the three to five key results this role must deliver? How will success be measured — what metrics, what leading indicators? What does “good” look like versus “great”? And over what time horizon — quarterly, annually? This is where you kill vague expectations. L is Leadership Limits and Latitude. This is the big one for decision rights. What decisions can this person make independently? What requires approval or at least consultation? Where are the boundaries of their authority, and where is it still pending or growing? Who do they lead or influence? And — this is crucial — when should they escalate? E is Experience, Exposure and Education. What skills, knowledge or visibility do they need to succeed in the role you’ve just described? What’s “must‑have” versus “nice‑to‑have”? Are there projects, cross‑functional work, or certifications that will build that capability? And finally S is Support. What resources, tools, and guidance do they need? Who do they go to for technical help? Where do they get strategic direction? What’s the escalation path? What budget decisions can they make, and what needs sign‑off? And who’s in their peer network or mentoring circle? Now, here’s how you turn ROLES into an execution design tool, not a one‑off exercise. Take the top ten recurring decisions in your business — the ones that keep bouncing up to senior leaders. It might be pricing exceptions, resourcing decisions, client issue resolution, safety approvals, discount levels, whatever keeps hitting your calendar. For each of those, ask: which role should be responsible and accountable for this decision? Then you run a ROLES conversation with that role. You define the Responsibility: “You own this decision.” You set clear Objectives and Outcomes: “This is how we’ll judge a good decision — margin, risk, time.” You define Leadership Limits and Latitude: “These are the thresholds where you can decide alone, these are the ones where you consult, and these are the ones you escalate.” Then you get honest about Experience and Support: “What skills or exposure do you need to be confident here? What training, what shadowing, what mentoring?” “What data do you need available so you don’t have to come back to me?” That’s how you safely push decisions down — you match authority with capability and support instead of just saying, “Be more empowered.” I worked with one operational business where escalation traffic was crazy. Senior leaders were being dragged into decisions about routine customer issues and minor operational tweaks every single day. We mapped their top ten recurring decisions, shifted three of them clearly down a level, and ran ROLES conversations with the managers taking them on. Within a quarter, escalation traffic dropped sharply. Those senior leaders got hours back every week, and the front‑line decisions actually got faster and better, because they were made closer to the action. In another case, a project organisation had big delays because every scope change had to go through two committees. Nobody was disengaged; they were stuck. We used ROLES to clarify who owned which type of scope decision and created clear latitude bands — “up to this value, decide here; above this, escalate.” Execution speed improved, and we didn’t add a single headcount. That’s the power of clean decision design using ROLES. So how do you take this from a nice idea to something that actually frees you up as a manager of managers? Let’s talk about decongesting your role using ROLES and your meeting rhythm. Start with your own calendar. For one week, audit it with a brutally honest lens. Ask, for every meeting or decision: is this at my level, or am I the hidden bottleneck? If you’re constantly being asked to approve work that someone else could reasonably own with the right clarity and guardrails, that’s a signal. You don’t need more resilience; you need to redesign ROLES. Often what I find is that senior leaders are unintentionally acting like a breakwater. Everything slams into them, they break the waves, but nothing really moves forward without their touch. Your job is to become more like a channel — to shape the flow so it moves faster, safer, at the right depth, without you having to be in every wave. Here’s a simple 30‑day ROLES experiment you can run. Step one: pick one critical process where you know you’re the bottleneck. Maybe it’s customer discounts, hiring decisions, operational approvals, or project scope changes. Don’t boil the ocean — choose one. Step two: identify the role that should own the majority of those decisions, one level down from you. Then schedule a ROLES conversation with that person. Walk through: Responsibilities — “Here’s the slice of this process you truly own.” Objectives and Outcomes — “This is how we’ll measure success: decision speed, margin, quality, risk.” Leadership Limits and Latitude — “These are the decisions you make independently, these require consultation, and these you still escalate to me. Here are the thresholds in plain numbers.” Experience, Exposure, Education — “What do you need to feel confident? What gaps do we need to close over the next 30 days? What can you shadow or practice?” Support — “Here’s the data, tools and people you can lean on. Here’s when and how you can reach me without turning everything into an approval loop.” Step three: redesign your inspection rhythm. Instead of approving every decision upfront, set a cadence to review outcomes. Maybe it’s a weekly 20‑minute check‑in where you look at a simple dashboard: what decisions were made, what went well, what needs tightening. You’re shifting from pre‑approval to post‑decision learning. For 30 days, track three metrics. First, decision speed: how long does it take from issue raised to decision made? Second, rework: how many decisions have to be re‑done or corrected? Third, senior hours recovered: roughly how many hours per week are you, and maybe your peers, no longer spending on work below your level? Those are numbers your CFO and your board will care about, because they connect people decisions to commercial outcomes. And here’s the side benefit: when people know what they own, have real authority, and feel properly supported, engagement usually goes up anyway. Not because you ran another survey, but because clarity creates energy. So as you think about your next leadership investment, I’d invite you to shift the question. Not “How do we motivate them more?” but “How do we redesign ROLES so decisions sit at the right level and the system moves faster?” You don’t have a motivation problem. You have an execution design opportunity. Start with one process, one ROLES conversation, one changed inspection rhythm over the next 30 days. See what happens to decision speed, rework, and your own time. Then scale what works. That’s how you simplify workload and amplify results. I’m Jimmy Burroughes, this is The Leadership Amplifier, and we’ll dig deeper into these tools in future episodes. Speak soon.
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