One of the euphemisms I don’t like is “leadership team”. This usually refers to one manager and all their direct reports, somewhere near the top of the org chart, and is a name that they have given to themselves. The autocratic self-designation of being leaders is kind of the opposite of what leadership is. If nobody in the organisation considers themselves followers of this team, and only does what they say because they feel forced to, then at best they are a “management team”.

In the short-term, it’s much easier to make decisions without input and then tell people after the fact. That’s why sometimes you’ll see otherwise-decent leaders lose their ability to lead when put under too much stress or pressure, becoming more autocratic. In my opinion, this is a decent signal for detecting when someone’s workload is getting to be too much.