I once sat through a forty minute board conversation about whether a program director needed a second signature on purchases under two hundred dollars. She had run that department for six years without a single audit flag. The board still wanted the signature line. That is not oversight. That is six years of telling a good hire she has not earned trust yet.
Here is the belief that gets me side eyed at conferences. Most of what passes for accountability in nonprofits and small businesses is not accountability. It is a board or an owner who hired someone they call smart and then built a system that assumes they are not.
Credentials Are Not the Job
I do not care where someone went to school. I have worked with people who came up through the school of hard knocks and outperformed every credentialed hire in the building, and I have worked with people who had the right degree and none of the judgment to go with it. If you can do the job and you are the right fit for the team, you should get the job. A written policy about who is allowed to have good instincts is nothing more than words on paper.
Where This Actually Shows Up
This shows up everywhere once you start looking for it. The grants manager who cannot approve her own travel without three sign offs. The executive director who has to run every hire under fifty thousand dollars through a finance committee that meets quarterly. The small business owner who built a whole approval chain for decisions his ops manager has been making correctly for years. None of that is rigor. It is a leader who never actually let go of the thing they said they delegated.
Micromanagement Is Bullshit
I am a millennial manager, and I will say the part out loud that a lot of people in my generation believe and will not put in writing. Micromanagement is bullshit. My rule is simple: do what you say, say what you mean, and be a good human who gets shit done. If someone is doing that, they have earned the room to do their job without a chaperone. If they are not doing that, the fix is a real conversation, not a new approval form that punishes everyone else on the team too.
The hard part is not finding good people. Plenty of nonprofits and small businesses are better at hiring than they think. The hard part is what happens after the offer letter, when the board or the owner has to actually believe they hired who they say they hired.
Hire smart people. Then get out of their way. If you cannot do the second part, you did not actually want help. You wanted control with better optics.
