A lot of times, people just need a gentle nudge, or an official blessing from an authority figure, to go ahead and make the change that is necessary. You can tell people to manage up, to fully own their work and their process, etc. But a lot of humans don’t want to step on others’ toes or be perceived as acting out of line. A worker on the assembly line might know the best way to make the line run more smoothly but it’s easy to think that’s “not my job” or “above my pay grade”. Sometimes all that’s needed is to tell them, “Yeah, go ahead and do it.”

Getting that to happen more automatically is one way out of this situation, but that tends to cause problems of its own, with blurry lines of responsibility and authority. So it works best with relatively flat organization structures, which aren’t used much in large organizations.