The Approval Death Spiral 💀: How Leaders Choke Momentum

PreSales for CollaborateBetter.us (Volume 7)

Sep 02, 2025

Top of the Series: You Can’t Herd Cattle (or Teams) Alone

Previous: If Everything’s a Priority, Nothing Is

Stuck in the Approval Trap? Why Your Decisions Are Slowing You Down

You don’t need another meeting.
You need a decision.

Yet somehow the simplest choices take weeks.
That new feature? Blocked.
That budget request? Delayed.
That project your team could have shipped in days? Still waiting for a “quick approval.”

Welcome to the approval trap—the leadership bottleneck disguised as collaboration.

At NASA, it’s not ‘chain of command’—it’s ‘chain of trust.’ Anyone can call a stop if the mission is at risk 🚀✨

The Fog of “Collaboration”

I’ve seen it happen everywhere—from federal agencies to high-growth startups. Leaders swear they’re empowering their teams, but in practice? Every decision circles back to them like moths around a desk lamp.

The result isn’t collaboration—it’s decision avoidance in a nice suit.

The best leaders figured this out long before Slack threads and inbox backlogs.

At NASA’s Mission Control, Apollo flight directors like Gene Kranz didn’t hoard decisions—they handed ownership to the specialists closest to the data. If the life-support officer said, “Go,” then the mission went. No waiting for one boss to approve every switch flip. Lives depended on clarity.
At Toyota’s factories, assembly-line workers had the authority to pull on cord and stop production the moment they saw a defect. They didn’t wait for six signatures or a meeting invite. That simple act turned accountability into quality—and quality into trust.

The pattern is clear: decisions should live closest to the consequences—not highest on the org chart.

*Toyota taught us: when every worker can pull the cord, every car gets built with pride* 🚗✨

3 Hidden Signals Your Decision System Is Failing

Endless “quick questions.”
If your team keeps pinging you for clarifications, it’s not speed—it’s a broken swim lane.
Slack ≠ decision system.
Conversation isn’t clarity. Endless threads don’t produce ownership.
Review cycles = approval traps.
If “review” really means “wait until the boss says yes,” you’re not reviewing—you’re stalling.
📊 Poll: What slows your team’s decisions the most?
- ❓ Endless “quick questions”
- 💬 Slack swirl with no owner
- ⏳ Waiting for approval cycles
- ⚖️ Fear of making the wrong call
- 📉 Missing context or data

Smart leaders empower teams by putting decision-making where the expertise lives

Escaping the Trap

Healthy decision-making isn’t chaos—it’s clarity. It looks like this:
✅ Roles are clear—and written down
✅ Decisions live closest to the work
✅ Reviews check alignment, not permission
✅ Failure triggers learning, not finger-pointing

The best teams don’t wait. They move.
Not recklessly, but responsibly—because ownership is clear.

Next Blog in the ‘Collaborate Better’ PreSale: Belief Bankruptcy ⚠️: The Final Stage Before Team Collapse

Why I Wrote Collaborate Better

Too many leaders are drowning, not because they’re weak, but because they’ve been taught the wrong model: that every decision must flow through them.

The truth? You don’t need to carry every burden—you need to clarify who carries what.

That’s why I wrote Collaborate Better: From Silos to Synergy — How to Build Unstoppable Teams.
It’s a playbook for escaping the bottleneck and scaling momentum without burning yourself out.

Next Blog in the ‘Collaborate Better’ PreSale: Trust Bankruptcy 💔: Why Teams Stop Believing Their Leaders