Your middle managers agree with the plan. That is not a consolation and it is not the beginning of a solution, it is the actual problem, because a plan that everybody agrees with and nobody executes has already ruled out the explanation you were about to reach for.
The standard diagnosis of an execution gap is buy-in. The plan was not communicated well enough, the why was not explained, people are not bought in. That diagnosis is wrong most of the time, and the tell is right there in the first sentence: the people you are describing as unconvinced can explain your plan back to you accurately, and several of them helped build it.
The plan is not the problem
Execution gaps are almost never comprehension gaps. Before you spend a quarter re-communicating, run the test: ask four middle managers, separately, what the priority is and what they are supposed to do about it. If you get four consistent answers, comprehension is fine and the problem is somewhere else entirely.
What you will usually get is four accurate answers followed by a version of the same qualification: they know what they are supposed to do, and there is something in the way. The something is different in each case and the shape of it is identical, which is the signal worth following.
Run the second half of the test as well. Ask the same four managers what would have to be true for them to hit the number. You are listening for whether the answers describe things inside their control or outside it, and in an execution gap they will overwhelmingly describe things outside it, named specifically, with the history of when they last raised it.
I review the Gallup research behind talent-first management in my podcast episode First, Break All the Rules: the four-kill verdict.
Why buy-in is the wrong diagnosis
Buy-in is an attractive diagnosis because it is flattering to everybody. It says the plan is right, the people are willing, and the missing ingredient is conviction, which can be supplied by a better all-hands. Nothing in that account requires anyone to change how the business is structured.
It also survives disconfirmation unusually well. When the re-communication does not work, the conclusion available is that it needs to be repeated, and businesses can run that loop for years. I have watched a leadership team hold three separate cascade programs on the same strategy across eighteen months, each one competently delivered, none of which moved anything, because the obstacle was never in anyone’s head.
The cost of the wrong diagnosis is not only the wasted quarter. It is that the middle layer now watches senior leadership respond to a structural problem with a communication exercise, and draws the obvious conclusion about how well their situation is understood. Every subsequent initiative arrives with that inference already attached, which is why the second cascade lands worse than the first.
There is a diagnostic shortcut hidden in how the qualification gets phrased. Managers who say they raised something and were told no are describing a decision, which is a legitimate constraint and usually a defensible one. Managers who say they raised something and never heard back are describing a queue, and a queue is not a decision. It is the absence of one, and it is the single most common thing sitting between an agreed plan and its execution.
What an authority gap looks like
An authority gap is the distance between what somebody is accountable for and what they can actually change. It is the most common cause of an execution gap and it is close to invisible from above, because from above it looks like a person who agreed and did not deliver.
The manager responsible for on-time delivery who cannot change the schedule. The one accountable for scrap who cannot stop a run. The one who owns customer satisfaction and cannot authorize a credit. In every case the accountability was assigned deliberately and the authority was never assigned at all, usually because nobody noticed it was a separate act.
What that produces is not inaction. It produces a manager who spends their effort on the part of the problem they can reach, which is usually documentation, escalation, and the construction of a record showing they raised it. That behavior gets read upward as bureaucratic and defensive, and it is neither. It is the only available response to exposure without control.
There is a second variety worth recognizing, which is the authority that exists formally and has been withdrawn informally. The threshold says twenty five thousand dollars and the last three people who approved something near it were asked to explain themselves afterward. Nobody rescinded anything. The practical authority is now closer to five thousand and everyone knows it except the person reading the policy.
You will not find that variety by reading the delegation matrix. You find it by asking what somebody approved recently and what happened next, which is a question about events rather than about rules.
Do your managers own a number?
Ask each one what single number they are judged on, and see how long the answer takes. An immediate, specific answer means ownership exists. Hesitation, or a list of four things, means the accountability is diffuse, and diffuse accountability produces exactly the execution pattern you are seeing.
Watch for the answer that names a number owned jointly with two other functions. Joint ownership of a metric is functionally no ownership, because improving it requires trading one function’s convenience for another’s and nobody in the arrangement can make that trade.
A useful follow-up is to ask what they would have to do to change the number if they were allowed to. A manager who has an answer ready has been thinking about it for a long time, which tells you the ownership is real and the constraint is elsewhere. A manager who has to construct one on the spot has been operating at a distance from the number, whatever the org chart says.
Do they control the inputs to it?
Take whatever number they named and ask what drives it, then ask which of those drivers they can change without asking anyone. If the honest answer is none or one, you have found the gap and you did not need a survey to find it.
This is the question that separates a capability problem from a structural one, and it is worth asking precisely rather than generally. Not whether they feel empowered. Which specific levers they can pull on a Tuesday without an approval.
Where the honest answer is two or three levers out of six, you have a partial gap, which is the most common and the most confusing case. The manager can move the number somewhat, does, and then stalls at a level that looks like insufficient effort from above. Ask which of the remaining levers they would pull first, and then decide whether to hand it over. Frequently the answer is yes and nobody had ever been asked.
One more thing to listen for. Some managers will name a driver they technically control and describe not using it, and the reason is usually that using it once produced a consequence. That is an informal withdrawal of authority rather than a capability gap, and it is corrected by a sentence from you rather than by a policy change.
Can they spend against it?
Ask what they can authorize without a signature, and compare the number to what it was five years ago. In most businesses it has not changed, which means inflation alone has been quietly reducing every manager’s real authority every year since it was set.
Nobody decided that. It happened by nobody deciding, which is the characteristic way authority gaps form. The correction costs nothing and can be made this month, and it is the single highest-return move available to most executives reading this.
One caution on how you ask. Threshold questions sound like an audit if you open with them, so ask the number question first and the spending question last, and explain at the start what you are trying to find out. A manager who thinks they are being assessed will describe the authority they are supposed to have. One who understands you are looking for obstacles will describe the authority they actually use.
The three-question test
Those three questions, asked of five managers in an afternoon, will tell you whether you have an execution problem or a structure problem, and they are almost impossible to answer misleadingly because each one asks for a specific fact rather than an assessment.
Ask them in that order, because each one only matters if the previous answer was yes. There is no point asking whether somebody can spend against a number they do not own, and the sequence saves you from the common mistake of raising thresholds for people whose actual problem is that the accountability was never assigned in the first place.
Do it in one sitting rather than across a month. Five conversations of twenty minutes each, on the same day, produces a comparison you cannot get any other way, because the pattern across the five is the finding. One manager blocked on approvals and four blocked on scheduling is a different diagnosis from five blocked on five different things, and only the same-day version makes that visible.
What happens when you close the gap
Closing an authority gap produces a faster response than almost anything else available to an operating executive, because you are not asking anyone to learn a skill or change a belief. You are removing an obstacle from in front of somebody who already wanted to move.
Expect movement within a fortnight on whatever the manager names first, and expect that the first thing they do is something small that has been waiting for months. That is the signal you want. A manager who uses new authority on a trivial item that has been stuck since spring is telling you exactly how much had accumulated behind the gap.
The second thing that happens is less obvious and more valuable. Other managers watch. Authority granted visibly to one person is read by the whole layer as a statement about what is now possible, and you will get requests from people you did not talk to within about three weeks. Treat those requests as the diagnostic continuing rather than as scope creep.
Why communication programs fail here
A communication program applied to an authority gap does not fail neutrally, it does damage, and the mechanism is worth understanding before you commission one.
Telling somebody who cannot change the inputs to their number that the priority is to improve that number communicates something you did not intend: that leadership either does not know what is in the way, or knows and has decided it is not going to be moved. Both readings reduce the manager’s estimate of how seriously the plan should be taken, and both are reasonable inferences from the evidence available to them.
The frequently cited fix here is better cross-functional collaboration. The Harvard Business Review work on cross-silo leadership treats the boundary problem as something leaders can bridge through practice and mindset. I would put it more structurally: in most of the cases I have looked at, the silo is not a relationship failure, it is a place where somebody was given accountability that crosses a boundary they have no standing to cross, and no amount of relationship work substitutes for granting the standing.
There is one case where communication is genuinely the answer, and it is worth naming so this is not read as a blanket dismissal. When a plan has changed and the middle layer is still executing the previous one competently, that is a comprehension problem and it responds to being told. The tell is that people are working hard on the wrong thing rather than working around an obstacle on the right one.
Watch what the requests are for as well as who makes them. A queue of requests to spend small amounts tells you the threshold was the binding constraint. A queue of requests to change something another function controls tells you the boundary is, and that is a different repair which you will have to make yourself rather than delegate.
Why training fails here too
Management training aimed at an authority gap has the same defect and one additional one: it locates the deficiency in the person. A manager sent to a leadership program because their area is not improving now has a documented development need attached to a problem that was structural, and that record does not get corrected later.
Training is the right instrument when the three-question test comes back with three yes answers and the area still does not move. That is a genuine capability question and it should be addressed as one. Reaching for it before running the test is how businesses convert a fixable structural defect into a personnel file.
The same logic applies to hiring. A business that responds to an execution gap by recruiting stronger middle managers is buying capability it already has, and the new people will be constrained by the same structure within two quarters. The unusual ones will notice faster and leave sooner, which makes the intervention actively counterproductive.
The related mistake is to conclude that the middle layer needs to be more accountable. Accountability is usually the only thing that has been distributed generously, and adding more of it to people who cannot act is how you produce the defensive documentation behavior described earlier, at greater volume.
What to do in the first 30 days
Three moves, all of which can be made without anyone’s permission if you run an operating function, and all of which produce evidence inside a month.
Assign single ownership of your five most important numbers. One name each, written down, circulated. Where a number genuinely spans functions, name the person who will decide when the functions disagree, which is the part that is usually missing.
Raise every spending and scheduling threshold to a number that makes your CFO mildly uncomfortable. Then put a clock on escalation: anything that goes up gets an answer inside 24 hours, including the answer no.
And ask each manager for the one thing they would change if they did not have to ask. Do the first one on that list yourself, quickly and visibly. The list is usually shorter and cheaper than you expect, and completing one item establishes that the new authority is real in a way that announcing it does not.
Do all three in the same month rather than sequencing them. Individually each looks like an administrative change and can be absorbed without much notice. Together they read as a deliberate shift in how the business is run, which is the message you want, and the combined effect is considerably larger than the sum because the three constraints usually bind on the same decisions.
Then leave it alone for a quarter. The most common error after granting authority is to monitor its use closely, which communicates that it was conditional and produces managers who ask permission informally to avoid being second-guessed formally. You will get better information from what they do with it than from what they tell you about what they are planning to do with it.
Report back what you found, to the people you asked. Managers who describe an obstacle and then hear nothing conclude that the exercise was performative, and you will get thinner answers the next time. Even where the answer is that a particular constraint is staying, saying so directly is worth more than silence, because it converts an unexplained obstacle into a decision somebody made.
What if the manager genuinely cannot execute?
Some cannot, and the three-question test is what earns you the right to conclude it. A manager who owns a number, controls the inputs, can spend against it, and still does not move after two quarters is a capability question rather than a structural one.
Handle it as one, with coaching, a defined horizon, and a written expectation. What you should not do is reach that conclusion about somebody who has been operating inside an authority gap, because the evidence you would be relying on was produced by the structure rather than by the person.
Give the coaching conversation the structure the test produced. Somebody being told their area is not improving hears a judgment. Somebody being told that they own the number, control the inputs, can spend against it, and that the results have not moved for two quarters is being shown the same reasoning you used, which makes the conversation about evidence rather than about impression. It also gives them a legitimate route to disagree, and occasionally they are right and one of the three answers was wrong.
A limitation worth naming plainly. This diagnosis assumes the plan itself is sound and the resources exist. If you are asking managers to hit a number that no configuration of authority would make achievable, the three questions will come back clean and nothing will move, and the finding is about the plan rather than the middle layer. Test that first if the numbers you are asking for have never been achieved by anyone.
About the Stagnation Assassin
Todd Hagopian is a Fortune 500 transformation executive who has generated $3B in shareholder value across Berkshire Hathaway, Illinois Tool Works, Whirlpool, and JBT Marel, where he serves as Global VP of Product Strategy and Marketing. Known as The Stagnation Assassin, he is the author of two published books: The Unfair Advantage: Weaponizing the Hypomanic Toolbox and Stagnation Assassin: The Anti-Consultant Manifesto. His blog is published in 15+ languages and read by operators worldwide. Bring him to your stage via his speaking page or connect with him on LinkedIn.
Running the three-question test in a room full of your own managers works better than running it one by one. They answer each other’s questions and the gaps surface in an hour rather than a month. Bring it to your leadership meeting.
See also: What It Costs to Fix a Business That Works, Why Flat Revenue Isn’t a Stagnation Signal