When governance lags behind the promotion
A multinational midstream pipeline company, several thousand employees, Canadian operations.
What happenedSix months into the role, a newly promoted VP of Operations sat across from me with a coffee, visibly exhausted. One of the hardest working people I know, on the edge of burnout, and the cause was still carrying 60 percent of his old job alongside the new one.
His name had moved on the org chart. His old role sat unfilled. His responsibilities had been distributed verbally across three of his former direct reports, and the decision authorities that came with the role stayed where they were. The strategic mandate he was promoted to deliver had barely started.
Why it happensAccountability was attached to him rather than to the role. When a person leaves a role that was only ever defined by who held it, the role becomes a vacuum. The promoted leader gets pulled back to keep the old work moving. The successors hesitate, because they hold the work without the authority. Adjacent roles absorb gaps that were never theirs.
What it costsApprovals slow, because every decision routes back to one person. The new VP loses credibility for carrying two jobs rather than for his performance. Good people watch the strain and start updating their resumes. At scale you get overlapping authority gaps across several layers at once, and decisions a competitor makes in a week take you a quarter.
A strong team absorbs this for a few weeks. After three months it has become how the company works.
The structural fixAttach accountabilities and decision authorities to roles rather than to people. When the role is the unit of governance, people move through the company and the decision rights stay put, and a successor inherits a defined scope. Say openly how the gaps are covered during the transition, and most of the anxiety goes out of it, because people can see the succession working as designed.
OutcomeFrom inside the company, we built an accountability management framework and a companion standard. The framework set the layers of the organization and the span of decision each layer carries. The standard set out the minimum accountabilities and authorities for every level, from first line worker to executive. Every process and procedure written after that named the level that performs the work and the level that holds the decision, so authorities stayed with the role when the person moved.
Where else this shows upAny company that has promoted from within faster than it has written down what the roles actually are.
Corrective actions: closed and fixed are different measurements
A multinational pipeline company, Canadian operations.
What happenedAn electrical arc flash badly burned a worker's hand one morning. That afternoon, in the VP of Operations' office, he pulled up the corrective action tracker from six months earlier. The plan was Electrical Safety Improvements, built to prevent electrical incidents. Procedure updates. Communication and training rollout. All of it marked closed.
He asked the question every operations executive eventually asks. Why is this still happening?
Why it happensClosed and fixed are different measurements. Closed means the assigned task was completed by a deadline. Fixed means the underlying issue stopped recurring. Most mid-sized operators measure the first and assume the second.
When incidents recur after a corrective action is closed, it is almost always one of three things. The procedure still falls short of the work being performed. The training and communication reached some workers at some locations and missed the rest. Or a worker set the updated procedure aside on the day it mattered.
A closed corrective action leaves you guessing which one.
What it costsA safety stand down across the organization. The VP addressing the workforce on protocols he assumed were already being followed. Equipment downtime. A lost time injury on the record. The same training and verification rolled out again, this time under twice the scrutiny.
The structural fixVerification. Going back to the work after the action is closed: audits, assessments, watching the job performed and confirming it meets the standard of care written into the procedure. Suitability, adequacy and effectiveness show up over time, and absence of recurrence is what proves them.
OutcomeFrom inside the company, and working with an electrical engineering consultancy, I was commissioned to write an electrical safety program. It was integrated into the health and safety program, aligned with the company's lifesaving rules, communicated across the operation, and every affected worker was trained on it. The lifesaving rules themselves were updated to include electrical energy, so the hazard now sits in the short list every worker is measured against.
Where else this shows upAnywhere a tracker is the main evidence that something was handled. Safety is where it costs the most, and the same gap sits behind quality, maintenance and client commitments.
Risk that was deferred one quarter at a time
An Alberta oil and gas producer, from the public record.
What happenedIn the spring, the Alberta Energy Regulator ordered a Calgary operator to suspend its wells, facilities and pipelines. The grounds were unpaid municipal taxes, unpaid regulatory levies, missed closure quotas and remediation commitments that had built up year after year. By September the regulator had concluded the company could no longer meet its obligations and ordered its assets abandoned and reclaimed.
Why it happensThere was probably a plan. Targets were missed. The capital was there and the decisions lagged behind it. The risk was deferred one quarter at a time, by people who each had a reasonable explanation for the deferral.
What it costsEvery operator in this sector has values posted somewhere: integrity, stewardship, accountability. The process behind the values is what pays the taxes, files the remediation reports and keeps the regulator's confidence. In this case the process ran out before the values did.
The structural fixA working risk management program identifies risks before they become incidents, controls them with named owners, stated tolerances and decision rights, and escalates them to the right level fast enough that someone can still act. Accountability sits at the top. Implementation runs all the way down to the workflow. That is how values get realized.
Where else this shows upAny risk register with more rows on it than named owners behind it.
