5 MINUTE SUNDAY · Every Sunday. One tip. Under 5 minutes.
Your calendar is full.
Your Slack is louder than it should be.
And somehow, nothing moves unless you're in the room.
It's not your team, but you have literally built a dependency problem.
— 01 — ONE LEADERSHIP TIP
You hired smart people. Then you made it impossible for them to act like it.
Here's what happens in most scaling companies: the founder makes a hire, trusts the person, gives them a title, maybe even a team. And then... without realising it... slowly trains them to stop thinking.
Not through cruelty. Through availability.
Every time you jump in on a thread. Every time you rewrite the deck before the client call. Every time you're the one who "just sorts it", you send a signal.
The signal is: your judgment is the one that counts.
Over months, your team learns to produce drafts, not decisions. They stop finishing things. They wait.
This isn't a motivation problem. It's a learned behaviour you accidentally taught.
The fix isn't a new performance framework or a better OKR system. It's removing yourself as the default answer.
That means letting imperfect decisions ship. It means not replying for 24 hours and seeing what happens. It means getting comfortable with "good enough from them" over "perfect from you."
The takeaway: The most expensive habit you have isn't spending.... it's answering. Every time you rescue a decision, you confirm that they were right to bring it to you.
— 02 — ONE COMPANY WORTH KNOWING
GitLab — the DevOps platform that runs 2,000+ people across 65+ countries with no offices and no managers making decisions their teams can make themselves.
GitLab's entire operating model is built on one principle: if a decision can be made without a senior leader, it should be. Everything is documented publicly in their company handbook (over 2,000 pages) so that anyone, at any level, can find the answer without asking upward. Meetings are rare. Async is the default. And the expectation is that you decide, ship, and document... not wait for sign-off.
GitLab went public in 2021 at a $15 billion valuation, built on a team that was designed from day one to operate without the founder in the room.
CEO Sid Sijbrandij didn't scale by being more available. He scaled by making himself unnecessary for the decisions that didn't need him.
The lesson: Documentation isn't bureaucracy. It's the thing that replaces you in every conversation you shouldn't be in.
— 03 — ONE THING TO ACT ON
Do this before NEXT Sunday.
Think about the last time someone on your team came to you with a problem and you solved it in under five minutes.
Now ask: why didn't they solve it?
Not because they lacked information. Not because they lacked intelligence. Because somewhere, at some point, the message landed that you're faster, safer, or more right than they are.
Pick one recurring problem type that keeps coming back to you.
Write one clear rule (one sentence) that tells your team how to handle it without you.
Post it where they work. Don't explain it. Don't caveat it. Just publish the rule.
Next time it comes up, point to the rule instead of solving it.
I worked through this exact issue with a CEO recently. He was running a 60-person company, Series B, strong team on paper.
But every week his calendar was a graveyard of decisions that should never have reached him. Product calls he didn't need to be on. Hiring sign-offs his managers were capable of making. Operational fires that existed only because nobody had been told they were allowed to put them out.
We didn't start with a new system.
We started with a single question: what is actually yours to decide?
From there we rebuilt the decision architecture around his leadership team: who owns what, what gets escalated, what gets decided without him permanently.
Within 6 weeks, his calendar had 40% fewer meetings.
Within 3 months, his leadership team was running weekly ops without him in the room.
For the first time in years, he had space to think like a CEO instead of operate like a coordinator.
If that sounds familiar, let's have a virtual coffee, on me.
Want more of this every Sunday?
5 Minute Sunday lands in your inbox every week (one leadership tip, one company worth knowing, one thing to act on)
See you next Sunday.
— Alisa
Fractional COO · Executive Adviser · 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 →
This issue also ran on LinkedIn — join the discussion there
