How leaders lose the room

A version of this article originally appeared in Quartz’s Leadership newsletter. Sign up here to get the latest leadership news and insights straight to your inbox.

Bill Belichick is considered by many to be the greatest football coach in NFL history with a resume that boasts six Super Bowl wins, a 70% playoff game winning percentage, and 333 career wins as the head coach of the New England Patriots.

Despite having as much success as anyone has ever had in the role, team performance fell dramatically in Belichick’s final two seasons as the Patriots coach. Belichick and the team parted ways following his 2023 four-win season, the worst of his career.

Are we to believe Bill Belichick forgot how to coach?

The reality is more uncomfortable: Authority has a half-life. Without effective maintenance or renewal, even elite authority decays over time.

A leader can have power, but run out of pull.

How authority decays

1. Strategic drift

“Credibility is inseparable from competence,” said Jon Hill, chairman and CEO of The Energists, an executive search and advisory firm for the energy industry. “If a leader doesn't stay current with regulatory realities, new technologies, or market dynamics, their team will gradually stop looking to them for direction. They may still respect the individual as a person, but will stop relying on them as a leader.”

The effect on teams can be subtle, Hill said, but they’re also serious.

“Decision velocity slows, alignment weakens, and informal leaders emerge. Most importantly, people stop going above and beyond for a leader they don't fully believe in. Preventing this issue requires intentional leadership. Strong leaders maintain proximity to the work. They make decisions, even if they're imperfect, and address issues early.”

2. Decision fog

“As the company scales and the leadership bench expands, decision ownership f***ery begins to take place,” said Lexi Petersen, founder and chief creative officer of Cords Club, a jewelry brand. “Eventually, leaders become interchangeable because of a shared aspiration to collaborate and develop consensus, and they begin giving inconsistent and diffused direction to teams. People begin to pick up on it. Tactics become more conservative, and each step is less ‘safe’ than the previous one. Managers will have an increased sense of personal risk and apprehension. People begin optimizing for justifiability instead of impact.”

The addition of more leaders at Cords Club as the company grew resulted in leaders becoming more “cliquey in the executive lounge,” Petersen said.

“We rebuilt authority by mapping out exact decision frameworks for high-stakes scenario planning and making Who owns this? a standing agenda item. As soon as we started clarifying authority, even in areas where there were differing opinions, our team cohesion increased, and execution velocity increased.”

3. Predictability collapse

Authority lives in predictability and slowly dies without it.

“When teams can predict decisions, expectations and priorities are then delegated. But whenever results get dicey, one set of priorities distracts from another week to week, or feedback is muddled and double-edged, people cease orienting around the leader and start self-protecting,” said Alex Mantziaris, founder of CASIANI, a luxury menswear brand. “It can sometimes be dramatic, the bar being raised if you run low on written confirmation, but often it’s quiet: People start waiting and waiting just a little longer for written confirmation, making small decisions ‘just in case,’ doing the minimum needed to dodge blame. A handful of repeat patterns build that downward momentum.”

4. Reactive leadership

When authority stops originating from inside of leadership offices, teams feel it.

“I have seen authority decay and, more importantly, how to restore it with a group of high-performing executive-level professionals,” said Scott Davis, CEO of Outreacher.io, a link-building services agency.

“The slow seep — reactive leadership becomes your only leadership,” Davis said. “The root of all authority decay is worse when this happens: when all external pressure, drama, and changes from the media and market, as well as other unexpected or standard occurrences — like regulatory or financial changes — start defining the timing of your decisions instead of your timeframe and schedule. Your team sees that you are hit by so much external authority and headlines that you keep rushing out immediate but not thoroughly thought-out urgent communications and revising or redoing big leadership decisions, even if you've just put them in place, so you can keep pace with those influences and stay 'relevant' in addressing them.

“People see that the 'gravity' within your organization and the leadership room has lost its internal source and is no longer originating within the room.”

Prescriptive authority renewal levers

“Leadership authority decays when the leader keeps spending from the same account,” said Robert Bates, author of “Why We Can’t Stop Caring: How to Value What You Feel.”

“Early on, teams grant ‘authority credit’ because the story is fresh: new leader, new energy, benefit of the doubt,” Bates said. “Over time, that credit becomes a ledger. Every missed promise, inconsistent standard, unexplained decision, or protected favorite becomes a withdrawal. Even small ones. Eventually the room stops lending. Not because people are rebellious, but because the exchange rate changed.”

Belichick is a clean metaphor, Bates said.

“When the outcomes flatten, you lose the gravity that made your words feel like physics,” he said. “The team starts reading you like weather instead of guidance. You can still have power, but you no longer have pull.”

Mitigation is not charisma. It’s portfolio management, Bates said.

His advice:

Renew the narrative: “Say what has changed, including what you got wrong. Teams forgive a reset. They punish denial.”

Rebuild the trust ledger: “Fewer promises, kept harder. Public standards applied evenly.”

Create successors on purpose: “Authority lasts longer when it is shared. Hoarded authority turns brittle.”

Rotate the ‘meaning channels’: “If you only communicate in metrics, you eventually sound like compliance. People follow leaders who can translate outcomes into meaning.”

“If decay has already set in, you have two options,” Bates said. “Either you re-underwrite the relationship through visible accountability and consistent behavior, or you step aside.

“Rehabilitating authority is possible, but only if the leader stops defending their past self and starts earning the next version in public.”