The leadership meeting ends with a decision and nods around the table. By Thursday, the head of sales is asking whether it applies to this quarter, and finance is pricing an exception.

The call gets made again, by you.

Everyone in that meeting agreed. Then each function heard it through its own scorecard and went back to the number it gets paid on.

Sales hears a revenue question, finance runs it through FP&A as a margin question, and operations hears headcount (the reopening always arrives framed as a clarification).

The leader is left as the only person carrying the whole call, which makes them the only one who can watch it come apart, one exception request at a time.

MIT Sloan’s study of 124 organizations found that only 28% of the executives and middle managers responsible for executing strategy could list three of their company's priorities. Agreement on strategy fell from 51% inside the top team to 22% one level down. The survey covers 4,012 respondents between 2012 and 2017.

A founder with five managers runs the same loop, where the Monday call becomes the Wednesday exception, the Friday escalation, and the next Monday's agenda item, and the person who made it spends the week explaining it again to people who already said yes.

The cost lands on you as time first and judgment second. Every reopened call has to be defended twice, and by the third round you start shading the next one toward what the functions will accept rather than what the company needs.

The rule I would borrow comes from the British rowing eight that won gold in Sydney, in Chief Executive’s account of the crew: discussions are not decisions, and a decision only counts once everyone commits to it, "whether I like it or not."

End every leadership meeting with each function head saying, in one sentence, what the decision changes in their own plan this week. If they cannot, it was a discussion.