The threshold is the job

Saturday observation, and it is the first thing I would want to know about a marketing job, ahead of the budget.

How much the person in it can approve on their own.

That number is in no job description. It is not in the offer letter, it rarely comes up in the interview, and it is often not written anywhere the holder can read. It lives in a delegation of authority schedule that finance keeps, set by people who were not thinking about marketing at the time.

Two directors can hold the same title and the same annual budget and be in different jobs. One can commit a month of media with a signature. The other needs a countersignature for a photographer. The first runs a department. The second runs a queue.

You can see which is which by how the year goes. Where the threshold sits below the size of a normal decision, the work becomes paperwork: a written case for something obvious, three weeks in a chain of approvers, a supplier who has stopped holding the date. The campaign still happens. It happens late, and it arrives as a version of itself.

The threshold is also a status fact, and everybody in the building reads it correctly. It is the organisation stating what a person can be trusted with unaccompanied. Colleagues learn that number faster than they learn the org chart and they route their requests accordingly, so a junior with a real problem takes it to whoever can settle it in the room, which is not always the person whose title says they own it.

The budget is what you are held responsible for. The threshold is what you are allowed to decide. They are set in different rooms, by different people, and only one of them gets negotiated when the job is offered.