You Cannot Ask People to Own Outcomes They Cannot Influence

Years ago, while working as a banker, I met a client who wanted to buy a fishing cabin during a visit to Alaska.

He owned exactly twenty five rental properties across several states. The properties were held in separate LLCs, with additional entities for property management and operations. It was a complicated structure, but not an irrational one. He had organized his businesses intentionally, had his financial records available, and understood exactly what he was asking for.

He needed around $50,000.

He was only going to be in town for a few days and expected to repay the loan after returning home later that summer. It was essentially a bridge until he could access his own funds.

From a practical standpoint, the request made sense. He had substantial assets, established income, and a clear path to repayment. It also seemed like an excellent opportunity to begin a broader banking relationship.

The problem was not his ability to repay the loan.

The problem was that the standard underwriting process could not easily connect his business income back to him. His financial life did not arrive in the simple shape the system expected.

I understood the structure. I could see the assets and the opportunity. The private banking side of the organization could have handled the request quickly, but that option was only available to clients who already had an established relationship there.

I had to tell him we were unlikely to complete the request before he left town.

He was understanding. People with complex finances often know that the same structures that help them manage and preserve wealth can make ordinary transactions more difficult.

I was embarrassed.

I prided myself on being able to help people navigate complicated situations. This should have been an easy opportunity to serve a desirable client. Instead, my understanding of his situation had almost no effect on the outcome.

I knew enough to recognize that the request made sense, but I no longer had enough agency to make that understanding matter.

What being a banker used to mean

When I started in banking, I worked with people who remembered underwriting loans themselves. I saw paper ledgers, safe deposit records, joint credit card arrangements, and processes that depended heavily on the banker understanding both the client and the product.

At one point, I could manage a home equity line of credit from the initial conversation through the application and underwriting process.

That authority narrowed over time.

First, the process was limited to more experienced bankers. Later, it was removed from the branch entirely. The local banker could identify the need, but the application itself had to be handled through a centralized processing center by phone.

To me, the role had once been straightforward:

Know the products. Understand the customer. Identify the need. Then determine how to make the right product fit the situation.

Over time, the job increasingly became identifying a need, sending the customer somewhere else, and waiting for the system to decide whether the client fit the mold.

Products disappeared from the branch. Decisions became centralized. Consumer insurance products, auto lending, home equity processes, and other areas of financial service moved away from the local banker.

Some of those changes happened for legitimate reasons.

Large financial institutions had experienced serious failures. Regulatory orders, risk controls, inconsistent execution, and the expense of maintaining complicated products all shaped the response. Not every employee was equally capable of handling detailed exceptions. Mistakes involving ownership, legal authority, lending, or account documentation could create real harm.

Standardization was not irrational.

But standardization, risk management, and the removal of professional judgment are not the same thing.

What gets lost when every exception becomes a problem

Some of the work I enjoyed most involved situations that did not fit cleanly into the standard system.

A client might have duplicate profiles, with some accounts connected to online banking and others effectively hidden from view. I learned how the older systems worked well enough to merge those profiles and repair the relationship.

Trust accounts, complex business entities, powers of attorney, guardianships, and accounts with several owners required more careful documentation and coordination.

A normal electronic process might require every owner to sign on the same day. If someone lived elsewhere or could not appear at the same branch, the process could trigger an exception and eventually threaten account closure.

In some cases, manual forms, notarized signatures, and a better understanding of the underlying policy created a lawful and accurate path forward.

I was not ignoring the rules.

I had learned enough about the rules to navigate the situations they were written to address.

I also built relationships with underwriters and specialists who could help when a situation needed additional attention. Other employees referred complicated clients to me. I coached bankers, helped tellers identify opportunities, supported branches during transitions, and developed relationships with clients who returned specifically to work with me.

The organization encouraged that kind of initiative.

At the same time, it continued removing the tools and authority that made initiative useful.

It wanted employees to build relationships, act with ownership, and earn customer trust.

But increasingly, the employee standing in front of the customer did not own the decision being communicated.

Ownership requires influence

Leaders often understand that employees do not have the same financial stake in a company as its owners.

What is easier to miss is that ownership is not only about compensation.

People are more invested in decisions when they have some ability to shape them.

When an employee is told to deliver a decision they did not make, cannot influence, and may not agree with, they do not truly own the outcome. They become the person passing the answer from the system to the customer.

That changes the role.

It changes who is attracted to the work, what skills are rewarded, and how much effort people are willing to invest in difficult cases.

The organization removes judgment because some employees are inconsistent.

The work then requires less judgment, so expectations and compensation decline.

Experienced or motivated employees leave, disengage, or redirect their abilities elsewhere.

The remaining role appears less capable of handling judgment.

That deterioration becomes evidence that even more authority should be centralized.

The result is a self fulfilling cycle.

The organization tries to reduce risk by removing discretion, then gradually loses the people who might have exercised discretion well.

The answer is not unlimited authority

I am not arguing that every employee should be allowed to override policies or make any decision they want.

Different employees have different strengths, experience, attention to detail, and tolerance for complexity. Some decisions genuinely need to remain centralized.

But discretion can be earned.

Organizations can establish levels of training, internal credentials, demonstrated accuracy, escalation authority, larger approval limits, and accountability for outcomes.

A new employee and an experienced specialist do not need to have identical authority.

The goal should not be to eliminate guardrails.

The goal should be to build guardrails that help capable people do better work.

Guardrails become counterproductive when they prevent trained and motivated employees from doing the work the organization hired them to do.

The same question now applies to AI

I think about this often as accounting and finance professionals begin using AI.

AI can make policies easier to search. It can help identify exceptions, collect relevant facts, explain complex rules, and provide access to information that previously depended on years of experience or knowing the right person.

That could give professionals more agency.

It could also do the opposite.

If people begin treating AI output as another centralized answer they are expected to pass along, we may repeat the same mistake. We may make the work faster while making the professional less responsible for the result.

Accounting and finance professionals still need to understand the situation, challenge the output, apply judgment, and own the conclusion.

The tool can help scale access to knowledge.

It should not eliminate responsibility.

People matter more than the process sometimes admits

Eventually, when I was told that my next meaningful career step might take another six years, I enrolled in college for accounting.

Part of that decision was practical. But part of it came from wanting to work in a field where understanding complexity still had value.

The branch where I worked closed less than six years after I left. The career path I had been told to wait for may not have existed long enough to reach.

I do not think the people centralizing decisions necessarily intended to make the frontline role smaller. They were likely trying to solve real problems, reduce costs, and create consistency across a very large organization.

Someone in that position might have made many of the same decisions I would have made without seeing the consequences from the other side.

That may be the larger lesson.

Smart people can build systems that make sense from the center while unintentionally removing the capability that made the system work at the edges.

Agency does not come from telling people they are empowered.

It comes from giving capable people enough room to make something happen, then holding them responsible for what happens next.

You cannot ask people to own outcomes while making it clear that their judgment no longer matters.