Your supply chain director watches a container sit on the wharf because the duty manager cannot release funds for after-hours trucking without three signatures that only exist on weekdays.
The escalation matrix lists the CFO for anything above fifty thousand dollars, yet the CFO’s phone goes to voicemail once the finance team leaves at four thirty. No one below that level holds authority to move the needle on service levels.
Teams learn the pattern fast. They log the issue, mark it urgent, and walk away knowing the real decision will land in Tuesday’s 9 a.m. stand-up. By then the customer has already gone elsewhere.
The cost is not just the missed shipment. It is the repeated training of new starters to treat every exception as someone else’s problem. That habit spreads into every other process that requires speed.
Fix the ownership first. Define a dollar and time threshold where the on-shift lead can commit resources without further approval. Publish it, back it with budget, and remove the manager who still forwards the email anyway.
Measure the change by counting how many Friday issues are resolved before close of business rather than carried into the next week. That single number tells you whether decision rights have actually moved or just been renamed.
Until the matrix matches the hours the business actually runs, every operational promise stays conditional on someone being back from the weekend.