🟡 5 MINUTE SUNDAY · Every Sunday. One tip. Under 5 minutes.
You keep saying you need to hire more people.
But the real problem isn't headcount. It's that every decision in your business still has to touch you.
And deep down, you already know that.
— 01 — ONE LEADERSHIP TIP
You didn't delegate the task. You delegated the doing and kept the deciding.
Most leaders think they're delegating. They hand off the task, they step back, they let people run. But then the team comes back with a recommendation and the leader rewrites it. Or approves it slowly. The work moved. The authority didn't.
This isn't a trust issue ,it's a structure issue. When you haven't defined what decisions your people can make without you, everything defaults back up. What's really happening is that your team isn't under-empowered. They're under-informed about the boundaries of their own power. They don't know where their yes ends and yours begins , so they ask, every time, to be safe.
Delegation without a decision boundary is just supervised doing.
The takeaway: The question isn't "do I trust them to do it?" It's "have I told them what they're allowed to decide?"
— 02 — ONE COMPANY WORTH KNOWING
Basecamp (37signals) the software company that became a blueprint for intentional, high-output small teams.
Basecamp has stayed deliberately small, under 80 people, while running a profitable, multi-product business for over two decades. The reason is ruthless decision architecture. Founder Jason Fried famously pushes decisions down to the person closest to the work, and the company's internal framework, Shape Up, is built entirely around giving teams a problem and a timeframe . Leaders at Basecamp don't approve. They set the appetite and get out of the way.
The lesson: The fastest companies aren't the ones with the best leaders making decisions. They're the ones where the FEWEST decisions NEED a leader.
— 03 — ONE THING TO ACT ON
Do this before next Sunday.
Write down the last 5 decisions your team brought to you this week. For each one, ask: should this have needed me? If the answer is NO , and it will be for at least three of them , pick 1 and write a single paragraph that tells your team what they're allowed to decide in that category, without asking. Send it before Friday. That paragraph is the beginning of a system.
⏱ Time required: 25 minutes
If you're still the one making decisions that shouldn't need you, this is exactly what we rebuild in 1:1 coaching. Here's how we work together →
See you next Sunday.
— Alisa
Fractional COO · Executive Coach · Keynote Speaker
Helping founders and senior leaders scale themselves, not just their business.
Ready to break through your leadership ceiling?
I work 1:1 with founders and senior leaders who are done being the bottleneck. Book a free 20-min call →
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