Every team has its own story of a decision that had to escalate all the way to the CEO. Ask two different managers who is allowed to make a call like this, and you'll get two different answers. Most teams could point to who owns a decision, and other teams would agree with them. Compare any two teams' decision rights and they look the same: documented and used without asking first. Decision rights get revisited on purpose as headcount grows, not left to drift team by team.

No one's sure whose outcome it was. It gets sorted out case by case. People have a rough idea, but overlapping ownership means more than one role could claim it or deny it. Most roles have a clear, documented outcome they're accountable for, so there's no need to ask around. Every outcome maps to exactly one role, and that holds up consistently across teams. Outcome ownership gets reviewed and adjusted on purpose as the org grows, not left to drift.

Titles get handed out informally. There's no shared sense of what any level actually means. Levels exist on paper, but each manager applies them their own way. There's a documented set of expectations for each level that any manager could hand to any employee. You could compare people at different levels across any two teams and show, with evidence, why one's ahead. The bar for each level gets recalibrated company-wide as the business changes, not just patched team by team.

It just stalls. No one else has the context or skill to pick it up. People could maybe cover it, but nobody's confident doing it without that person's input. There's an informal go-to backup, even if that's never been written down anywhere. Every critical area has a named, written-down backup who could step in without missing a beat. More than one person is deliberately kept able to cover any critical area.