By Pham Ha, Founding President & CEO, LuxGroup®
In the early years of LuxGroup, a decision could move quickly because the distance between an idea and the founder was short. I could hear what a guest wanted, speak with the team, make a choice, and see it put into practice. That closeness helped us build a business around personal service and a distinctive understanding of Vietnamese culture.
As the business grew from travel into boutique cruises and other cultural experiences, the same habit became harder to sustain. More people needed decisions. More decisions crossed the boundaries between brands. A question about a product might also involve staffing, cash, safety, or the reputation of the wider group. Bringing everything to my desk could preserve consistency, but it could also slow capable leaders down.
This is a familiar founder’s dilemma, yet calling it a problem of “delegation” is too simple. A founder may formally hand over a decision while everyone still waits for a signal about what the founder really wants. Managers may have job titles but lack the information, relationships, or confidence to act. Employees may see that the safest course is to seek approval, even when the organization says it values initiative.
The deeper issue is how power works. LuxGroup’s ambition is to become a house of small giants: specialist businesses with the freedom to serve their markets, supported by a shared purpose and selected group capabilities. That model will work only if influence can move beyond the founder without losing the standards that made the group valuable.
Authority on paper is only the beginning
A delegation chart can state who approves a supplier, hires a manager, changes an itinerary, or proposes an investment. It cannot, by itself, explain what happens when a decision is uncertain.
Consider a leader developing a new cruise experience. They may be authorized to shape the product, yet need cooperation from finance, marine operations, sales, and the people responsible for guest service. If those colleagues do not understand the proposal or trust the decision process, formal authority will achieve little. The leader may return to the founder to resolve every disagreement.
This is why I have begun to think of power as a set of relationships, rather than a box on an organization chart. Who has the information? Who can commit resources? Whose judgment do others trust? Who bears the consequences if an experiment fails? These questions reveal how decisions actually move.
For LuxGroup, the first practical step is to map recurring decisions in our destination management and boutique cruise businesses. We need to see which ones reach me, why they are escalated, how long they take, and what information was missing. The purpose is to identify where founder involvement adds value and where it has become a substitute for a clear process.
Some matters should remain at group level, particularly major capital commitments, safety standards, financial exposure, and choices that could affect the reputation of several businesses. Many commercial and service decisions should sit closer to the people who understand the guest and the operation. The difficult work is defining that boundary well enough that leaders can act without guessing.
Trust makes delegated power usable
Founders sometimes ask why managers do not take more ownership. Managers may ask whether they will be supported if a reasonable decision produces a disappointing result. Both questions matter.
A leader cannot be accountable for a decision without access to the relevant numbers, the people needed to carry it out, and an agreed way to escalate exceptions. Equally, the group cannot grant broad discretion without knowing how risks will be reported and reviewed.
At LuxGroup, this means pairing authority with a few practical routines: a decision log, clear approval limits, regular reviews of unit performance, and a forum for discussing strategic uncertainties. A review should examine more than whether a revenue target was met. It should ask what the team learned, what happened to guest experience, whether the decision affected staff or local partners, and what it did to cash.
The aim is to make trust observable. A unit leader who explains a choice, shares contrary evidence, and raises a problem early gives colleagues a reason to trust their judgment. A founder who allows a decision to stand within agreed boundaries shows that delegated authority is real.
That second part can be uncomfortable. I may disagree with a leader’s preferred route while accepting that it is theirs to choose. If I quietly reverse such decisions, the organization will learn the actual rule: wait for the founder. Power shifts only when behavior follows the stated policy.
Culture needs room for disagreement
“Luxury is Culture®” is central to how we describe LuxGroup. But a cultural commitment has little meaning if it can only be interpreted by one person.
Our businesses serve different guests in different settings. A destination management team may face a choice about how to adapt an itinerary. A cruise team may need to balance a memorable experience with operating constraints and the character of a place. They should be able to apply shared principles to those choices, explain their reasoning, and challenge one another’s assumptions.
That requires attention to whose voice carries weight. Seniority, proximity to the founder, and control of a budget can all make some opinions easier to hear than others. Frontline colleagues may notice a service problem first yet feel least able to challenge a plan. A partner in a destination may live with the consequences of a decision without being invited into the conversation.
We cannot remove every difference in power. We can design meetings and reporting channels that make useful disagreement possible. Before approving a significant change, leaders can ask whose interests are affected, whose perspective is absent, and what evidence would cause us to change course. Raising a concern should be treated as a contribution to decision quality, not a failure of loyalty.
Measure whether the shift is working
A founder can declare that a business is empowered. The evidence must come from what happens afterward.
I would look first at the number and type of decisions escalated to me. Fewer escalations would be encouraging only if decisions remain sound. I would also track the time from proposal to decision, exceptions to agreed limits, guest feedback, employee concerns, and the financial consequences of choices made at unit level.
Numbers alone will not tell the whole story. If decisions become faster because people stop reporting problems, that is not progress. If a unit meets its profit target by weakening service or postponing necessary maintenance, it has not become a successful small giant. Leaders need space to explain the tradeoffs behind their results, and the group needs the discipline to examine them.
We have not completed this transition. The governance model is being designed and will need to be tested against actual decisions, including those that go badly. That is the only credible way to learn whether authority, controls, and cultural commitments reinforce one another in practice.
For me, the personal test is straightforward. Can LuxGroup’s leaders make good decisions that I did not make, while feeling responsible for the guests, colleagues, partners, places, and capital entrusted to them?
The founder’s role does not disappear when that happens. It changes. I must be clear about the purpose we share, the boundaries we will not cross, and the questions that deserve collective attention. Then I must make room for others to lead.
A house of small giants cannot be built around one large shadow. It grows when each business develops its own judgment, and when the group gives that judgment both support and accountability.
