Retune authority

Change how much someone is allowed to decide on their own, without changing what they do: give more freedom where the track record is good and mistakes are easy to undo, and less where a mistake is expensive or permanent.

You coach a youth soccer team on Saturdays, and Maya is your assistant coach. She has run warmups for a full season, and every single week she texts you a photo of the drill she wants to use and waits for a thumbs up. You are at your daughter's recital, phone face down, and 14 kids are standing in a field doing nothing. Meanwhile Maya also holds the club binder, and last month she signed a new player's medical waiver herself because you were unreachable.

Retune authority means adjusting action rights, the decisions a person or tool may make alone, while leaving the work itself exactly where it sits. The cue is a bottleneck of approvals on cheap, reversible choices, or a real mistake in a place nobody ever agreed to hand over. Do three things. Write down what she actually decides today. For each item, ask two questions: has she shown she can do this, and how hard is a bad call to undo. Then widen the safe ones and narrow the costly ones, out loud. Maya picks her own drills now; waivers and any roster change come to you, always. What changes is that Saturdays stop stalling and the one dangerous gap closes. This is the wrong move if the real problem is that she was never taught the job.