Leadership transitions create the highest risk window for power hoarding: when a new boss takes over a department, budgets get reworked and added headcount becomes up for grabs — and a power-hungry leader can capture all of it. That is the central warning from a new analysis on how organizations let newly promoted managers concentrate authority, and what HR can do about it.

The piece identifies four distinct forms of hoarding that people teams should be watching for in succession and promotion decisions: hoarding direct reports, hoarding decision-making, hoarding resources and hoarding credit.

What does hoarding look like in practice?

When a department gains approval for new hires, the incoming leader faces a choice. They can take every new employee as their own direct report — or assign management of those hires to one or two senior-level employees, giving them the chance to build management skills.

An anti-hoarding culture pushes leaders toward the second option, the author argues. Delegation is not just a development tool for potential successors; it directly affects the department head's own productivity and work quality. A leader buried in building and maintaining what experienced employees should handle cannot take a bird's-eye view across the department.

What happens when decision-making is centralized?

The analysis includes a concrete case of the cost. In one work group, employees were not empowered to respond with their own ideas and plans for getting work done. The result: they forwarded many messages every day to a department leader who was on medical leave. Multiple people who did business with that group reported long waits for a response — or no response at all.

The author's calculus is blunt. Yes, a lower-level employee might make a bad call when given decision authority. But the risk of poor customer and client service from delayed and forgotten messages is greater. And learning to make decisions happens through trial and error — centralized decision-making strips those training opportunities away.

The nuance matters too: for an especially sensitive decision, it is understandable that a department head would want to make the call themselves. The red flag is a leader who builds a culture where employees feel that most, if not all, messages must be forwarded upward.

How should budget authority be shared?

Budgeting is one of the most valuable skills a departing leader can pass to the senior employees positioned to succeed them, the analysis argues. The leader ultimately controls the budget, but there are lessons in sharing each business unit's slice of it and then making allocation decisions together with the people who head those units.

The contrast the author draws is sharp. An unethical, insecure or incompetent leader treats the whole budget as their own and allocates the most to projects they are personally tied to. Newly promoted leaders should instead be trained to distribute resources according to the greatest opportunities for profit, and to discuss investment options openly with each business unit: new marketing? An updated product or service? A new employee? The test is whether money goes where it benefits more than the leader's own passion projects.

Who gets the credit — and the blame?

For organizations that lack an anti-hoarding training culture, the fallback is accountability. One incentive for power hoarders is taking the lion's share of the credit when things go well. The author's counter is symmetrical: if you have given a leader the freedom to hoard power, make sure they also get the "credit" when things go badly.

The piece closes with two questions aimed squarely at HR and leadership development owners: Do you train against power hoarding in your leadership development curriculum? And what is the best way to create managers who are competent at distributing power throughout their department — and secure enough to do so? As leadership pipelines tighten, organizations that leave those questions unanswered may find their succession plans stalling at the very top of the org chart.