Comment by brandall10

With all due respect, outside of staff+ levels, if your reports are off in the weeds being productive building the wrong things, isn't that more of a management problem? Even very persuasive reports should require sign-off on how they spend large chunks of time. It's a hallmark of good management to push back and regularly ensure goals are aligned. Empowering employees is important, but that should be for the 'how', not the 'what'.

Your visibility is above theirs. You are regularly in meetings they are not. There is a distinct information asymmetry. It's your responsibility to convey what is important. Same with your manager to you, your skip to them, and all the way up the chain. No matter what the company's overarching goals are, at the IC level they may only have enough visibility to understand how valuable the business segment/team they're on is and read between the lines and move to another team.

Yes, really good employees can learn and bubble things up from cross-functional work or skip meetings to cover their supervisor's blindspots, but that's not a good look and could be potentially harmful, ie. could damage relationships if not handled carefully.

Being resource constrained is not an excuse. Hire or slow down. Business can't support it? Well, it's not a great business. Inmates running the asylum and all that jazz. Scapegoating reports for operational failings is toxic.