Hiring managers does not automatically free you up if those managers were never taught how to actually manage. Lia breaks down the three root causes keeping owners stuck in the weeds and walks through a simple narration method for teaching decision-making without adding more meetings. This episode is essential for any owner or founder who promoted people into management roles and is still fielding every fire.
This episode is part of the Delegation, Bottleneck & Getting Out of the Weeds series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“Every time it comes back into your court, you become the accountable person, because you’ve made the call, right?”
“…we don’t just hand it off and say like wish you luck. That’s what gets us stuck is thinking it’s an all or nothing.”
“We cannot be making every single decision, even if we want to be, even if we feel like it’s not taking all our time, because it will never let your leaders fully step up.”
“We can’t uplevel ourselves, we can’t be more strategic if we are the doer of everything.”
Episode highlights
Death by a thousand paper cuts
Even a two-minute decision creates a bottleneck. When those two-minute moments stack up across a week, they keep you buried in the day-to-day and make it impossible to zoom out to the bigger picture. Lia frames this as “death by a thousand paper cuts” and asks listeners to pause right now and name two or three decisions that keep landing on their desk that genuinely do not need to.
Why you accidentally became the accountable person on everything
Every time a team member brings a decision to you and you make the call, you absorb the accountability for the outcome, good or bad. Your team holds back a small but real piece of ownership because they did not own the decision. Multiply that across dozens of sign-offs a week and you have a team that is, in Lia’s words, doing about 80 percent of the work knowing you will get it over the finish line.
High-performing teams vs. struggling teams (and what it means for you)
Lia draws a sharp distinction between two situations. On a high-performing team, capable leaders keep escalating because they are not sure whether you actually want to weigh in. The bottleneck is about unclear expectations, not missing skills. On a struggling team, leaders are not building the decision-making muscle at all and are waiting on you by default. Both situations require action, but the starting point is different. If you cannot trust that your team will make a reasonably aligned call without you, that is a capacity-building problem, not just a process problem.
Offboarding a decision is not just handing it off
The most common mistake is treating delegation as an all-or-nothing move: either you make the call or someone pulls an answer out of thin air. Lia pushes back hard on this. Offboarding a decision means sharing how you think through it, agreeing on how you will be informed once the call is made, and building a lightweight system (a Slack message, a dedicated channel, a Friday email) so nothing disappears into a void. The system does not need to be heavy. A Slack message that says “here is what we decided” is a system.
Articulate your decision-making process out loud
Lia’s core framework: most leaders are already running through a mental checklist when they decide something, they just have never made it explicit. She uses the analogy of a design school critique. A student who says “I considered the client brief, weighed these constraints, and landed here” survives the professor’s questions. A student who says “I just made it look cool” gets torn apart. Your team needs the checklist, not just the answer. When you name the factors you weigh and share that with your team, you give everyone a repeatable process for making decisions that are aligned with your priorities even when you are not in the room.
The Snippets tool as an early-warning system
Lia recommends pairing this decision-offloading work with the free Snippets template (available at liagarvin.com/snippets). When team members capture top wins, upcoming priorities, and places they are stuck each week, patterns surface quickly. You can see where decisions are piling up, where someone is escalating the same thing repeatedly, and where you can resolve a recurring question once instead of fielding it every time.
What if you kind of like being involved in everything
Lia closes with an honest call-out. If the real issue is that this team or business is your baby and stepping back feels like losing control, that is a different conversation. The solution there is getting clear about where you genuinely want to be informed and kept in the loop versus where you are involved out of habit or anxiety. The goal is not to disappear. It is to stop being the default so your leaders can fully own their work and you can focus on growing the thing.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 233: Why you’re still the point person for everything (and how to fix it). Being stuck as the final decision-maker on everything is almost never a delegation problem. Before delegation can work, three things have to be in place: the right people, clarity on where you as the owner should focus, and simple systems that reduce noise. This episode is most useful for business owners and team leads who have already hired and communicated expectations but are still buried in the weeds.
- Ep 231: Why delegating keeps failing (and the shift that actually fixes it). Delegation fails when leaders dispatch tasks instead of handing off outcomes, keeping themselves as the bottleneck at every step. The fix is shifting from fetch-the-answer assignments to giving a team member ownership of a full result, with clear context, defined success, and agreed checkpoints. This episode is especially useful for leaders who know they should delegate more but still find everything coming back to them.
- Ep 221: Clients keep asking for you by name. How do you hand off work without losing their trust?. When clients insist on working with you personally, the bottleneck is rarely about your team’s ability. It is about two separate problems: your team needs your method translated into real training, and your clients need a clear, confident message that your team delivers the same standard you do. Lia walks through the exact moves to solve both sides, from codifying your secret sauce to publicly edifying your team members in front of clients. This episode is most useful for founders, consultants, agency owners, and service-based business leaders who are stuck as the face of every client relationship.
- Ep 220: You hired managers. Why are you still in the details?. Hiring managers does not automatically free you up if those managers were never taught how to actually manage. Lia breaks down the three root causes keeping owners stuck in the weeds and walks through a simple narration method for teaching decision-making without adding more meetings. This episode is essential for any owner or founder who promoted people into management roles and is still fielding every fire.
Want to go deeper?
The Unstoppable Team. How to build a team that runs without you in the room.
Full transcript (click to expand)
Lia (00:00): You hired a group of really capable and talented people. You asked them to step up and take the lead. And yet, they’re still coming to you for the final approval or the final sign off on big decisions. And it feels like, didn’t ask for this. This is not something, I’m not a micromanager. I wanna be hands off. And yet, if people are coming to me, I don’t wanna reject them. I don’t wanna say, no, go deal with it if they want my support. So what do I do?
Now, this is a challenge so many of us face in our businesses. And a lot of times our teams come to us because, well, yeah, I mean, it’s easy for us to make the call. We might have the answer, right? A kind of, you know, off the cuff. We know what we want. It’s easy to be decisive. But when our team members are coming to us for the final decision on everything, even if it’s a small two minute thing, this repeated kind of coming back to us over and over and over.
or the bottleneck of even if it’s a two minute thing, but we’re out of town or we don’t see the email till the morning or whatever, this keeps us so deep, so deep in the weeds. Even if it feels like, again, it’s just like here and there, it becomes this death by a thousand paper cuts that will always create this limit on how you can scale. Now, why is that? Because if you truly are involved in making all of these calls, how?
can you step up? How can you get out of the day to day if everyone is coming to you for kind of even trivial like little things? You really can’t. So as I talk about this today, I want you to be thinking about what are the little things that maybe are easy for you to sign off on that people are coming to you that you just don’t have to be involved in deciding.
Thinking about it. Yeah, think about it. What could it be? Could it be one or two things? Maybe, maybe it’s a list of 50 things. But again, as I’m talking, think about what could that be? Jot it down, write a note on your phone, write on a post-it, come back to the, pause, come back to this later. Because this is something that’s going to create a step change in your ability to kind of see the bigger picture, get out of the weeds and have your team members really step up.
in a more ownership kind of capacity. If everyone is coming to you to make the final call, they do not see themselves as having their butt on the line for making decisions. And that right there is the definition of accountability. So essentially, you are the accountable default person on every single thing people get your sign off on. Even if you didn’t mean to be, even if you have strong leaders, even if everyone’s like really running with stuff and things are flowing.
every time it comes back into your court, you become the accountable person, because you’ve made the call, right? If it goes well or doesn’t go well or works out or doesn’t, it’s because of your quote unquote decision. So people always hold back a little bit of that sense of ownership, because they didn’t take ownership of it. Now, in high performing teams, what usually happens is this really keeps you stuck in the weeds, you’re having to be involved in
all of the different meetings, all the different levels of sign-off, you’re sort of a, you’re operating as a CEO or business owner or, you know, lead, but you’re still also operating at another level of like active leadership team member or team member. So you’re, you’re operating on two levels of altitude. That’s doing two jobs at once. Maybe it’s doing seven jobs at once. And it keeps you stuck, even if things are moving well, even if, you know, again, it’s, it’s quick. Now for teams that are struggling,
What happens is you start to see leaders really not step up. They don’t take ownership at all. And they do work about 80 % knowing you’re gonna be the one that gets it over the finish line. Now that is a bigger challenge because not only are you doing seven jobs at once, your leaders are never building that muscle and they’re not actually asking for it. And that’s where I say it’s on struggling teams because…
Think in a high performing team, you’re gonna be running into a tension where your leaders are trying to make the calls or trying to get to the other line, but they think that you actually want to make the call potentially, or they’re just doing it as a gut check. So it’s keeping you stuck, it’s keeping you engaged in the day to day, but it’s for a different reason. If your leaders really don’t have the capacity to make the calls, or you don’t trust that they’re gonna make the right calls without you, or you feel like, we’re not quite at a place where I can fully step out,
There is a lot to work through in that situation. Now, it doesn’t mean you have to like get rid of all your data and start over or that people aren’t, you know, aren’t cut out for it. But it means you’ve really got to build that capacity because you cannot be relying like if there’s moments when they can’t get your sign off, they’re just going to be sitting there waiting. worse, when you when you say, hey, I want you to take the lead on this. If you’re worried that their instinct isn’t going to be the make
right decision, how are you ever gonna let go? So what we wanna do there is really build up our team leaders decision making capacity. Actually, everyone in our entire organization’s decision making capacity. We’ve got to build that up because what we want is people that feel confident making decisions and they’re making decisions that are aligned with what you would decide or what you would hope someone that understood the priorities and the vision of your company would decide.
Like maybe they’re an expert in their field and you actually don’t know what the right decision is. Don’t you want someone in leading or overseeing that area or that respective piece of the work to have a point of view on what we should do? Yeah, yeah, you do. So again, I’m gonna ask you to take a second and think about what are decisions? Now for this question where I’m actually not the domain expert, but I’m still weighing in on, what are those?
Okay, maybe it’s one thing, maybe it’s 10. And who really should be making that call? Now some of us are listening and thinking, well, yeah, I don’t have team members that can do that yet. I’m not in a place where I have, you know, a COO or a CMO or a, know, head of sales or whatever. I don’t have a person that can do that. So I’m making the call in the meantime. Okay. So that’s good to be understanding.
Because what you’re going to wanna do is once you hire that person and once you figure out when it’s time, like to translate some of the decision making thought process on them so that you can be onboarding them faster. Now, if we do have someone that should be making the call, this is where boom, we wanna make this change immediately. I want after this episode, I want you to start thinking about, what is the offboarding plan of this decision onto this team member that should be owning it?
And when we offload a decision that we’re making onto someone else, it’s not just saying, okay, like, hey, this is yours, you own it, make the call, like, good luck. That’s where we get stuck. That’s what we think. Well, if I’m not making the call, like, how do I even know they made the right call? It’s like, ⁓ hello, talk about what you do to decide, talk about how you’re gonna get the information, talk about how you’re gonna cascade the decision down the chain.
We don’t just hand it off and say like wish you luck. That’s what gets us stuck is thinking it’s an all or nothing, thinking that if we don’t make the call, someone’s gonna just pull something out of thin air and it’s gonna be wrong. We’ve got to safeguard all of this. And when you think if I’m not doing it, someone’s gonna be wrong or if I’m not doing it, what about this? All the what abouts are things that you solve with simple communication, know, little systems you can put into place for lack of better word.
Now when I say system, I don’t mean implementing some like really heavy handed reporting structure. I’m saying, hey, if I’m translating, if I’m paying off this decision, ⁓ what is the agreement for like how I’m gonna be informed on what that decision was? That’s what I’m talking about with the system. So if you’re not making the call, how do you become informed? Maybe someone sends you a Slack message, hey, here’s what we decided. That’s the system. That is how simple this can be.
And when I’m working as a fractional COO with businesses and diving in and looking at, hey, what are these little simple systems to remove them from the weeds? That is the level of shift we’re talking about, which opens up hours and hours and hours of their time and steps, they get their team members to step up at another level. It’s things like that. That’s what we mean by a system. Or saying, hey,
⁓ Everyone is constantly writing on Slack and everyone’s kind of getting buried and we don’t know what decisions are made. Okay, so a system could be, you know, create a Slack channel that says like key decisions made and put them in there. Boom, system. And then ask everyone, hey, every single morning check this Slack channel. It’s gonna have the big decisions that are affecting your work every day or this week. Or maybe we send an email on Fridays capturing any decisions that are made. One email, takes five minutes.
this is what I’m talking about. These are simple shifts, but you’ve gotta be looking at, what are the breakdowns happening? And all of the breakdowns, I would say, can be identified by the things that are keeping you up at night that you’re getting worried about that are making you feel stuck and that you’re saying, well, I just have to do it because X, Y, Z. And because we’re talking about decisions today, it’s about where are the places, again, that…
you’re making calls because it’s intuitive or you don’t have someone to do it or because you’re worried someone’s gonna get it wrong, those are symptoms of actually not having a clear process for how decisions are made.
And when we figure that out, when we actually identify, ⁓ okay, so when I make a decision, I think about this, this and this, I consult with XYZ, then I break it down into kind of a couple options, I weigh this and that, and then I make a call. That is the simple system, that’s your process for making a decision. And sharing that with your team members, that’s gonna solve both sides of the problem.
That’s gonna solve the problem where you have really competent leaders that wanna be making the decisions but think that you wanna weigh in. No, you’re saying, okay, I get it, I’m choosing to step out. And it’s gonna solve that challenge of having folks that haven’t quite stepped into that capacity and you’re showing them, okay, here’s the process I want you to work through. Show your work like a math problem and then make the call. And then you get insight into, how is this leader making decisions? How is this team ever making decisions? Are they following this process?
when they make a decision, is it because like, I don’t know, I just guessed, or did they have, you know, some things that they were considering weighing? I remember my husband went to design school, he went to art school, and when he was ⁓ getting, know, when you’d have to present work in front of the teacher. And when you’d go up there and present a design, you’d have to say, okay, here’s what I thought about, you know, here’s the client brief, here’s the different considerations I worked through, and that is why I put this together.
If you went up in front of your professor and said like, I don’t know, I just made this kind of look cool, the professor is gonna like rip you to shreds. You wanna be, when you are designing or making something, right, especially for a client, you want to be thinking about, what’s kind of the mental checklist I ran through? It’s the same thing with your leaders and you’re already running through a checklist. You specifically the leader listening to this, you’re running through something, even if it’s intuitive. So you want to start to get that down.
saying, what is this process for making decisions? What am I doing? And that’s why, you know, that’s one of the first places that I start with my clients is looking at, what is the process for making decisions? What are you looking at? What are you weighing? What are you thinking? And as we talk through that, and through a series of questions that I use to tease that out, we can really quickly identify, okay, so this is the expectation we wanna set with our teams. And then when we communicate that to our managers or our employees or whoever it is, that’s where we can start to see
everything up levels and you start to find, okay, I don’t have to be in every decision. Now, the last piece of this is maybe you kind of like being involved in everything because this business is your baby or this is a team you’ve been on for a very long time and you’re feeling like, well, if I’m not involved in this, like what actually am I doing? That is a different issue, my friend. And that again is about how do you communicate the expectations of how you want to be kept informed, where you want to weigh in.
and things like that so that you don’t start to feel like I’ve lost control of the situation and I don’t know, things have kind of snowballed in a direction that you don’t like. But in general, as leaders, we always wanna be finding great talent that’s better at these individual roles than we would be. That’s the point. We can’t uplevel ourselves, we can’t be more strategic if we are the doer of everything. And so again, that’s why this conversation on decisions,
this and thinking about this and starting with what are those two or three decisions that I’m gonna try to offload by doing this, this is going to free up time so quickly for you. And you’re gonna say, wait a second, I’ve got time to focus on the bigger picture things like growing the business, growing the teams, kind of rethinking the strategy, looking at what’s next, understanding the implications of AI in my business, whatever it is. We don’t have space for that when we are stuck in the weeds. We just don’t.
Now this is where the snippets tool, I know I’ve mentioned on the show a number of times, actually comes in really, really handy. Because having a place where your team categorizes every week, know, top wins for the week, priorities for next week, places they’re stuck, this is gonna show you where maybe they’re trying to make decisions or they’re escalating things to you, or they’re maybe not escalating things to you. And for folks that are stuck with this kind of making a lot of decisions, using the snippets tool and implementing this with their team, you know, it takes five minutes a week for people to fill out.
starts to give them a lot of signal into where they could be using this framework around, know, freeing themselves for some of the decision-making. So if you haven’t implemented that with your team, it’s a free Google Doc or Word doc template at liagarvin.com slash snippets. And it will give you a place again to start to see
where are things coming up over and over that you can resolve at once by saying, hey, here is how we decide around this, or here’s something I wanna offload, or hey, I saw a lot of this trend is showing up over and over, let’s try this. So it gives you insights on all sorts of things, but it’s especially critical if you wanna get out of the weeds around this decision-making thing. So grab that at liagarvon.com slash snippets. And if this decision-making thing is like, I’m getting it, I’m feeling stuck, I don’t really know what to start,
Reach out. This is one of the places that starts to unlock the most freedom for you as a leader. We cannot be making every single decision, even if we want to be, even if we feel like it’s not taking all our time, because it will never let your leaders fully step up. So if you want to start unlocking this and you don’t really know where to start, or you’re like, yes, I want you to help me do this, reach out, hello at liagarvin.com We are going to free up so much of your time, but not only that.
really get your leaders to step up because that’s gonna unlock all of the ability to scale as a team. All right, see you next time.
Questions this episode answers
Why does my team keep coming to me for every decision even though I want them to be more independent?
When your team always gets your sign-off, they stop seeing themselves as the accountable person on any decision. You become the default accountable owner every time a choice comes back to you, even if you never intended that. Your team members hold back a small piece of ownership because, technically, you made the final call. The fix is not telling them to figure it out on their own. It is building a clear process for how decisions get made and communicating that process so they can run with it confidently.
How do I hand off decision-making to a team member without things going sideways?
Do not just tell someone a decision is now theirs and wish them luck. That is where things break down. Walk them through how you actually think through a decision: what you look at, who you consult, how you weigh options. Then set up a simple way to stay informed without being involved, like a Slack message saying here is what we decided. The goal is offboarding the decision with a process attached, not just dropping it on someone and hoping for the best.
What is a simple system to stop being the bottleneck on team decisions?
It does not have to be complicated. Create a dedicated Slack channel for key decisions and ask everyone to check it daily. Or send one Friday email capturing the major calls made that week. The point is agreeing on how decisions get communicated so you stay informed without needing to approve everything. A system here just means a simple, consistent way of sharing information so nothing falls through the cracks and you are not the one holding everything together.
How do I build my team's decision-making capacity when I don't fully trust them to get it right yet?
Start by making your own decision-making process visible. You are already running through a mental checklist, even if it feels intuitive. Write it down: what you consider, what you weigh, what a good outcome looks like. Share that framework with your team and ask them to show their work, like solving a math problem. This gives you insight into how they are thinking, helps them build the muscle, and means decisions stay aligned with your priorities even when you are not in the room.
How do I know which decisions I should stop making and hand off to someone else?
Start with two categories. First, decisions that feel quick and easy for you but are still pulling you into the weeds over and over. Second, decisions where your team member is actually the domain expert and you are not. If someone on your team knows more about that area than you do, they should be making the call. Jot down even two or three decisions you could offload this week. That small shift starts freeing up serious time and pushes your leaders to take real ownership.