You write the job description. Warehouse, fleet, facilities, “overall operational efficiency.” One person, one title, everything underneath it. It reads clean on the page. It solves nothing on day one.
Here’s what actually happens. The new hire starts. They ask who owns the call when a shipment runs late and a client is furious. Nobody answers cleanly. They ask who signs off on a facilities spend over five thousand pounds. Three different people think it’s them. Within a month, every decision that used to route through you is routing through you again, just with an extra person in the loop, asking permission first.
The hire wasn’t the problem. The operating model was.
You can hire someone brilliant into a role with no defined decision rights, and one of two things happens. They freeze, waiting for permission that never quite arrives. Or they start making calls that step on toes nobody warned them about. Either way, you haven’t bought back your time. You’ve bought a translator between you and the chaos that was already there.
The vacuum wearing a job description
Picture the fifty-year-old family distributor bringing on its first true Operations Manager. Warehouse, transportation, fleet, facilities, one new hire, one title, decades of decisions that lived informally with whoever happened to be standing closest to the problem. Nobody ever wrote down who decides a routing change versus who decides a hire. The new manager isn’t stepping into a role. They’re stepping into a vacuum wearing a job description, and they’ll spend the first six months discovering its edges the hard way.
Or picture it the other way. A logistics company opens a new region and hires one person to run it, three time zones from head office, with no map of what stays centralised and what travels with them. That manager doesn’t get an operating model. They get a phone that rings every time they guess wrong.
Neither of these founders is careless. Both did what looks, from the outside, like the responsible thing: they hired ahead of the problem. But a hire can only inherit what already exists. If the decision rights were never drawn, the new person doesn’t get to draw them either. They just get blamed for the confusion that predates them.
The test
Here’s how to check your own business this week. Pick the last operational decision that landed on your desk, a pricing exception, a vendor call, a scheduling conflict, whatever it was. Now ask yourself honestly: if the person you’re about to hire, or the person you already hired, had made that exact call without asking you first, would you have backed them?
If the answer is yes, obviously, you probably already have more structure than you think, and the real gap is just telling them so. If the answer is “it depends,” or “I’d need to know more,” or you can’t answer at all, that’s not a training gap. That’s an undefined decision right. No amount of onboarding, however thorough, fixes something that was never decided in the first place.
The operating model has to exist before the person does. Not a manual nobody reads. Not a slide from an old strategy day. Just clarity, written down somewhere real, on who decides what, and what happens on the rare occasion two people disagree about who decides. Build that first, and the hire you make afterwards finally gets to do the job you actually hired them for, instead of quietly doing yours.
If you’re about to make this hire, or you’ve already made it and you’re watching the same decisions boomerang back to your desk, let’s talk it through: https://calendar.app.google/nJyTsHMsJJ5TnCzBA