If two people own the task, nobody owns the task
This piece was originally shared on LinkedIn in response to recurring conversations with founders and leadership teams around this topic.
I’m publishing it here as part of an ongoing body of thinking around restaurant strategy, market entry, and operational decision-making.
This summer, HSBC’s newly appointed CEO took his senior team offsite with one goal:
A culture reset, centred on accountability.
When a 200-year-old institution is rebuilding its performance around ownership, it shows how universal the issue can be.
Across hospitality, the same patterns occur. In more than 100 openings, the biggest delays I’ve seen haven’t come from market pressures. They’ve come from unclear accountability.
We see it in:
→ Committees replacing decision-making
→ Emails with 20 people when everyone's really waiting for one person to reply
→ Job titles suggesting authority while decisions sit elsewhere
→ Tasks shared between multiple people that move slowly
→ Teams over-consulted when they don’t need to be involved
These projects struggle not because of capability, they stall because they have an accountability problem.
Progress happens when one person has the authority and freedom to deliver. When that ownership is defined, decisions move faster, teams work with purpose and a heightened sense of responsibility.
“Who owns the outcome?” is still one of the strongest performance questions an operator can ask.
Since first sharing this, I’ve seen the same issue surface repeatedly — particularly with businesses entering new markets or scaling too quickly. The underlying challenge is rarely strategy itself, but how early decisions constrain execution later.