One of the most interesting discussions I've had around this was at a small company who mass-hired a bunch of people from a big company. We went round and round in circles for a while because of issues similar to what you're describing. I ran a small 4-6 person hardware team (softly blurry on the edges) and the new people wanted significant amounts of design and documentation review as well as financial oversight. We needed $40 worth of solder and connectors and had to wait a week for PO approval as well as demonstrate that we had gotten multiple quotes... even though there was just a store down the block that sold exactly what we needed.
Anyway, after a month or two of this I started catching significant flak because my team was nowhere near as productive as it used to be. Complaining about slow POs was met with "maybe you should plan better". Complaining about design reviews for one-off boards that would go from idea-to-problem solved was met with "you're engineers, you need to document your work". It was painful and I came very close to resigning.
What ultimately worked, though, was figuring out a catch phrase that spoke the language of the new people: "accountability without authority". This ruffled some feathers but once I repeated "you are trying to hold me accountable for delivering a $500,000 project on time but are not giving me authority to buy $40 worth of stuff to execute on that" enough times it finally got through and the system started to change. But man did it suck for a while.
Anyway, after a month or two of this I started catching significant flak because my team was nowhere near as productive as it used to be. Complaining about slow POs was met with "maybe you should plan better". Complaining about design reviews for one-off boards that would go from idea-to-problem solved was met with "you're engineers, you need to document your work". It was painful and I came very close to resigning.
What ultimately worked, though, was figuring out a catch phrase that spoke the language of the new people: "accountability without authority". This ruffled some feathers but once I repeated "you are trying to hold me accountable for delivering a $500,000 project on time but are not giving me authority to buy $40 worth of stuff to execute on that" enough times it finally got through and the system started to change. But man did it suck for a while.