Don't Design It in Front of the Person Who Has to Run It
Building the process with the person who has to run it in the room looks like a virtue. Two authorities take damage at once, and a team watching every uncertainty resolved does not read it as honesty.
Somebody joins to own a function that doesn't exist yet. You're building the process with them in the room, because that's obviously the right thing to do. They get ownership. They see the reasoning. Nothing arrives as a decree from people who've never done the work.
All of that is true, and it's why the practice is so hard to argue with.
It's also where two things go wrong at once, and they compound.
Ownership becomes weight
Give somebody visibility into every open question and they start carrying all of them.
That's not a failure of resilience. It's what visibility does. A person who can see nine unresolved decisions is holding nine unresolved decisions, whether or not any of them are theirs to make.
And the effect changes sign depending on how much room they have. Somebody with slack experiences it as being trusted. Somebody already at capacity experiences the same meeting differently, and the question quietly shifts from I'm shaping this to why is all of this landing on me.
Nobody says that out loud in the meeting where it happens.
Then they start assessing you
This is the one people don't see coming.
Watching two senior people work out, in real time, whether the current process is right, produces a question you never want your newest person asking.
Do these people know what they're doing?
And here's what makes it expensive: the answer is yes. They do. Working it out in the open is what competent people do with a hard problem. But that's not what it looks like from a chair where you've been in the building three weeks and have no baseline for what normal deliberation sounds like.
Two authorities take the damage simultaneously.
The outside expert's, because uncertainty is now visible and it reads as not knowing rather than as thinking.
The manager's, because they're revising their own instructions in front of somebody who has to follow them. That one is worse, and it's usually invisible to the manager, who is experiencing the meeting as productive.
The distinction that resolves it
Somebody's practical expertise is what makes the thing work once you've decided what to do.
It isn't what helps you decide.
Those are different jobs and they want different rooms. The first one wants the person who'll run it, in detail, with authority, early enough to change the design. The second one wants a small number of people who can be wrong out loud without it costing anybody's standing.
Open-door design asks for both at once, which is why it feels generous and lands badly.
The fix isn't to exclude anybody. It's to know which of the two things you're asking for in a given hour, and to do the deciding somewhere else.
In practice that's not complicated. You take the question away, you come back with two options and a recommendation, and then you genuinely want their answer on which one survives contact with the work. They're being consulted on the thing they're expert in. They're not watching you find out whether you have a plan.
The trap underneath all of it
Radical transparency is a real strength in a leader. I'd rather work for somebody who has it than somebody who doesn't, and most of the failures I see run the other direction, with too much decided behind doors and announced as fact.
But it has an edge, and the edge is closer than people think.
A team that watches every uncertainty get resolved in front of them doesn't experience it as honesty. They experience it as nobody being sure.
Those feel identical from the inside of the person being transparent. They're completely different from the outside. And the tell is not available to you, because a team that has started to wonder whether anybody's in charge does not raise it. They go quiet, and quiet is indistinguishable from agreement right up until somebody leaves.
So transparency about what was decided and why: as much as you can stand. Transparency about the deciding itself, performed in front of the people who have to execute it: that's a smaller dose than the instinct suggests, and the instinct is very confident.