"Make it happen." When a senior leader says this to their team about a complex initiative without defining what "it" is, how it gets done, or what good looks like, they're not delegating. They're abdicating. And they're about to burn out the people underneath them.
I've been on both sides of this. I've been the person receiving the "make it happen" mandate and wondering what planet I'm on. And I've been the one called in to fix the wreckage after it goes sideways.
The root cause is almost always the same: the leader knows the outcome they want but hasn't done the hard work of translating it into something their team can execute. That translation work is unglamorous. It requires sitting with ambiguity, asking dumb questions, and being honest about what you don't know. Senior leaders who are afraid to look uncertain skip it.
When I see this pattern, I don't call it out directly. I do the translation work with the leader, so they experience what clarity feels like. Then I help them do it for their team. The goal is to build the muscle, not to be the muscle.
Takeaway
I've learned to spot this in the first week of any engagement. It usually comes with two other symptoms: no one can articulate the actual goal in the same way, and the team has stopped asking clarifying questions because they've been punished for it. If I see all three, the first conversation is with the leader, not the team. The team isn't the problem.