- Best for
- Founders who’ve become the bottleneck, where good people wait on you before anything moves.
- Time to run
- One afternoon to write the decision list. Eight weeks to hand the calls over.
- You finish with
- A decision list for each key call, showing who can decide what, and a simple way to see if it’s working.
01 The problem
You hired smart people. But every decision still ends up on your desk. Not because they can’t decide, but because nobody ever told them they could. So they play it safe and ask you.
Things slow down. Customers wait. Your team feels second-guessed, and you feel like nobody steps up. Handing over everything at once feels risky, so you hand over nothing.
02 The numbers
You’re handing each decision over step by step, from tell me first to just do it. These three numbers tell you if it’s actually moving.
| Measure | How to get it | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Decisions waiting on you | Every Friday, count the decisions your team is holding until you weigh in. | This is the bottleneck in one number. You want it going down week after week. |
| Decisions that come back | Track how often a decision you handed over lands back on your desk. | A few is normal. A lot means the rule isn’t clear or the step was too big. |
| Decisions you’d undo | When you review what your team decided, mark any you’d have truly done differently. | This tells you when it’s safe to move someone up a step, and when to slow down. |
Rule of thumbMove someone up one step when they’ve made the call well a handful of times in a row. If you keep wanting to undo their calls, step back down and explain why.
03 The steps
- 1List the decisions that wait on youWho: you. Time: one hour. Done when you have a list of the decisions that most often sit waiting for you.
- 2Set a step for each oneWho: you. Time: one hour. Done when each decision has a person and a step: tell me first, decide and tell me after, or just do it.
- 3Tell the team, out loudWho: you and your team. Time: thirty minutes. Done when everyone on the list knows their step for each decision and where the sheet lives.
- 4Review every two weeksWho: you and each person on the list. Time: eight weeks. Done when you’ve checked the three numbers four times and moved people up or down based on what you saw.
Pick one decision you make all the time that someone else could clearly handle. Tell that person: from now on, you decide this and tell me after. Then don’t touch it for a week, even if you’d do it a bit differently.
04 The template
Write down what your team can decide without you. Then get out of the way.
BIZPLAYBOOKS
Kevin helps owners use AI to get time and money back, then turns what works into free playbooks.
