Commitment implies binding decisions, which are rare in authority-based organizational structures (it’s worth to note that military is an exception in some cases).
A commitment to learning, for example, is almost never part of that binding because it’s often much harder to justify by proving value or other means. In that narrow sense, a “learning organization” is kind of an oxymoron in a lot of cases.
Likewise, a commitment to empowering employees, to innovation or to digital transformation is just as illusory both in their probability to bind and in people’s confidence of it. As long as decisions are not binding, there are opportunities for institutional corruption.
However, authority is not the issue here.
Sometimes authority is needed to get certain things done. It’s probably okay for a higher authority to override a certain binding decision, as long as it can also be democratically justified.
The real issue is how we implement oversight. Specifically, only a democratic oversight justifies binding decisions with an overriding authority.
If we don’t have effective and efficient means to put that overriding authority in check, then the authority could be easily corrupted and people could easily lose the confidence of its justification. When that happens, binding decisions become unbinding – not because binding decisions can’t be made without the intervention from a higher authority, but because we are not confident how that override could be legitimate and to the best interest of the people who could be impacted by it.
There’s nothing wrong with overriding binding decisions until it becomes an unfortunate habit of rendering the very decisions unbinding. In a sense, the override can be unilateral, but its justification has to be bilateral. Without convincing justification that secures people’s confidence of the overriding authority, arbitrary overriding easily renders any decision unbinding.
Do your executives love to claim their commitment? How many of them actually end up doing it?
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Noah Fang 