How do I get my team to stop relying on me for everything?

How do I get my team to stop relying on me for everything?

Your team isn’t asking you because they can’t think for themselves, they’re asking because the decision logic only exists in your head. Every time you jump in and answer instead of writing the answer down as a rule, you teach them that coming to you is faster than deciding on their own. The fix isn’t a pep talk about ownership or a new org chart. It’s documenting your most-repeated decisions as simple if-this-then-that rules your team, and eventually AI, can run without you, starting with the questions you answer the same way every single time.

Why does your team keep coming back to you instead of deciding themselves?

Your team keeps coming back to you because a verbal explanation doesn’t actually allow them to have a resource to come back to. Unless somebody has a perfect memory, they’re not going to remember exactly how you explained something to them. For one task, they might come to you two, three, four times before they get it down and they don’t have to come back to you. But if that task doesn’t happen very often, that could be a month or two between different takes of it, where they forget completely.

Another issue is the common delegation failure loop. You give somebody a task and it comes back not quite right, so you get frustrated and you take the task back for yourself. You conclude that it’s just faster to do it yourself, which, sure, that’s correct in the short term, but in the long term you don’t actually get any time back.

A simple fix for the first issue is the standard operating procedure. A dedicated set of instructions just removes the factor of not knowing what to do later down the line. But, the mindset of letting your employees figure it out is different. You really got to evaluate if that not quite right issue is actually impactful to the task. Is it not quite right because it’s actually not correct or is it not quite right because it’s not how you like it? Because if it’s the latter, then being nitpicky is actually holding you back. Whereas being not correct is fixable. You can correct the issue, give it back to the person who did it with those corrections and be like, hey, next time do this instead of that.

If you’re completely unmotivated to fix either of the issues, you’re really missing out. Going back to that catastrophic long-term issue, staying the bottleneck for everything will not allow the business to grow. You can’t expect the business to gain any traction if it’s you doing everything. In fact, leaders who delegate effectively actually generate 33% higher revenue and even stronger team performance than those who struggle to let go. So to the benefit of your own mental health, to avoid burnout, as well as the growth of the business, I implore you to actually figure it out and start delegating.

Sources: HBR – Research: How to Delegate Decision-Making Strategically; Feel the Boot – Why founders don’t delegate as much as they should

Measure yours in 3 minutes: the free Task Audit scores how much of your recurring work could run without you.

Is it really a weak team, or is it a missing system?

And your team’s not weak, right? You hired each person because you thought they could do the job that they told you they could. And sure, maybe if you fired some people for not being able to do the job, in general, the people you hired are good at what they do, or at least better at what they do than you are at doing it. But when you hire them, they don’t actually know your systems, how your business operates, and all that kind of stuff. So that’s where the issue of a weak team comes into play. You think your team not knowing what to do, coming back to you when they have issues or not working well together is because the team itself is weak. But it’s not. You should be able to put the majority of people on a team together and have them working well together no matter who they are. Obviously you’ll have the exceptions to that in any group of people who genuinely don’t work well. But, the vast majority of people should work out. If they’re not, then the system that runs the business is really the problem.

And what I mean by this is that the way one task is completed doesn’t work well with the next one. A well-built system or process actually makes the work more efficient. One task flows into the next so that no productivity slows down. And the same thing goes for work handoffs. Somebody getting a document from one person should have all of the necessary information to continue their work right away. And if they don’t, if they have to go scramble to find the right things, or if information is missing, then the system is broken. And I don’t mean having to go find things is a part of the task. I mean, does the handoff provide all of the necessary information to continue doing the work? If something in the previous work is missing that should have been there, that’s going to throw off the person who takes over. And when this happens, all the manager or the business owner sees is the issues. They don’t see the underlying problem of the system not working correctly and so they deduce that the team is weak rather than the system is wrong.

How do you turn your own decision-making into something your team can run without you?

I mentioned SOPs earlier, but when you make an instruction document where you write down each repeatable step, that’s what you get. And I mentioned this is how you typically ensure somebody knows how to do a process without having to tell them over and over. How do you actually turn your own decision-making into something your team can run without you? This is a lot more complicated, but AI can actually help you inform your employees without you actually needing to be there.

So, similarly to writing down a repeatable step to get an SOP, when you write down a repeatable decision, the actual criteria you use to pick A over B, you get something very valuable. A rule. You’re making these judgment calls every day. You know that if the client asks for X, then do Y – such as, if it’s under $500, approve it, or if the deadline’s inside 48 hours, escalate. These aren’t checklist items like an SOP, rather, they’re judgment calls made explicit. And so every time somebody comes to you for help with a decision, instead of getting annoyed that they’re coming to you, keep it as a learning moment, but also record it. These decisions can be turned into a decision bank that you can store somewhere.

Now, to make it even more powerful, you start involving AI. A written decision rule and a prompt to AI are essentially the same artifact. The moment that your criteria are explicit enough that a new hire could apply them without you, then it’s explicit enough for AI. And you’re not writing it twice. Writing it down one time serves both audiences. And so that’s why I told you to record it. If you create that decision document somewhere in Google Drive that’s available to everybody on the team, they can then go to an AI chatbot, point it at that document, and actually have AI find the decision and help them act. And the moment that the AI can’t figure something out, then they come to you. And when they do come to you, you now know that it’s not in the decision document, which allows you to be a little less annoyed because you know that you haven’t said it before.

This is exactly what will go in the first layer of an AI operating system. The first layer of an AIOS is the context layer, which is turning what’s in your head into something systemized. The more information you give AI, the more it’s able to reference and act in your favor. And then you add your team to that same AI and everybody’s getting the benefits of your knowledge. And while you can gate some of the information to your team, it is highly beneficial for the entire team to know the strategy, what your business goals are, along with the decision document that you just made.

Which decisions should you document first?

If you read previous versions of this newsletter, this is about to seem very familiar, but the logic is the same as what to automate first with AI. For decisions specifically, we’re going to look at frequency and how consistent your own answer actually is. You’re going to start with the obvious because what’s obvious to you might not be obvious to everybody in the business. But it’s going to be the very routine, easy to call decisions. These are the things that probably annoy you the most when you’re actually getting the questions from your team, because in your mind, they’re no-brainers. But this is exactly why we’re tackling them first. If you never have to answer the super obvious questions again, you’re unlikely to get annoyed by new questions coming up because they’re no longer the obvious ones. You’ve actually put those into the AI and your team is using the AI to figure it out without you, and since they’re so obvious, the AI answers very quickly.

If you want the measurable results of doing the obvious questions, a case study was done where a service business owner was fielding 43 repeated quick questions a month. Even with just four simple SOPs, the interruptions that got cut from the workflow got them back around six hours per week.

Once you get all of the obvious ones out of the way, you can start working on the less and less obvious ones, but once you’ve gotten a good chunk done, your team will firstly, stop asking you questions as much, and secondly, start coming to you with questions that make you think “yeah, good thing you asked me about this.” But then you just record that decision, add it to the document, and AI uses it for when it comes up again.

In terms of limiting what goes in there, this is up to what you’re comfortable with your team actually having access to. I think the more sensitive decisions will end up coming to you through your own work rather than one of your employees work because these decisions will be the ones that are actually growing the business. An employee isn’t likely to come to you with one of these business decisions unless it’s really pertaining to the work that they are doing for you.

Source: Offsite Professionals – The “Zero-Question” Handoff

What actually changes once your team stops needing you for the routine stuff?

Allowing decisions to be removed from your plate will allow for a couple of things. Firstly, all of that frustration that comes up when an employee doesn’t know something will be a relief. In general, you won’t have to oversee your employees as much, because if they do need guidance on a simple decision, they will simply be able to ask an AI that has the exact decision written out for them. When a more complicated decision does come up and they don’t know the answer to it and AI can’t help them, then yes they come to you. But that question will be much more complicated and you’ll actually have some relief knowing that, yes, they tried and the AI couldn’t help them, so they came to you instead of trying to figure it out themselves.

Secondly, when nobody’s asking you how to make decisions day in and day out, you get a lot of time back. That time can be spent on anything, but if we’re staying strictly within the business, it’s to be spent on the decisions that only you can make. Those hard decisions like should we hire somebody else? Do we have capacity to take on more clients? What’s the strategy for improving revenue? It’s all that kind of stuff that no one employee would ever come across because it’s not related to the work they’re doing. Once again, this is having the time to work on the business rather than in it, and removing yourself as the bottleneck so your business can run better.

If we are talking outside of the business, this becomes the ability to be confident that the business will run without you. Having decisions figured out by each employee without you means you don’t actually need to be there every day. You can take the day off, a sick day, or even the longer vacation, you don’t have to work past five every day, you pick your hours, you pick where you want to work, all that kind of stuff.

Not sure which decisions are actually eating your week? A free Task Audit maps where your time is going and shows you the one to document first: Get your free Task Audit

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Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash.

Frequently asked questions

Why does your team keep coming back to you instead of deciding themselves?

A verbal explanation doesn’t give your team something to come back to, so unless the task happens constantly, they’ll forget the details and have to ask again. The other cause is the delegation failure loop: a task comes back not quite right, you get frustrated and take it back yourself, which feels faster in the moment but never actually gives you time back.

Is it really a weak team, or is it a missing system?

Your team usually isn’t weak – you hired people capable of the job, they just don’t automatically know your systems or how your business runs. When one task doesn’t flow cleanly into the next, or a handoff is missing information, that’s a broken system creating the confusion you’re mistaking for a weak team.

How do you turn your own decision-making into something your team can run without you?

Just like a repeatable step becomes an SOP, a repeatable decision becomes a rule once you write down the actual criteria you use, like “approve anything under $500” or “escalate if the deadline is inside 48 hours.” That same written rule works for both your team and AI, since a decision rule and an AI prompt are the same artifact – which is exactly the Context layer of an AI Operating System.

Which decisions should you document first?

Start with the most obvious, routine decisions first – the ones that annoy you most because the answer is a no-brainer to you but not yet to your team. One service business owner fielding 43 repeat questions a month got roughly six hours a week back after documenting just four of them as SOPs.

What actually changes once your team stops needing you for the routine stuff?

You stop getting interrupted for routine decisions, since your team can ask AI instead and only the genuinely complicated questions reach you. That frees you up for the decisions only you can make, like hiring or strategy, and gives you the confidence to take a day off or a real vacation knowing the business runs without you.

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