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.
This episode is part of the Delegation, Bottleneck & Getting Out of the Weeds series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“Most decisions that we have to make day-to-day, they’re two-way doors. Meaning we make the call, we don’t love it. That website copy, you know, the social media post, we can just change it.”
“…if we are making every single decision in our business, it means a number of things. First, that we are making it seem like we wanna make every single decision.”
“…we haven’t made it safe for people to make mistakes. That means there’s no psychological safety or, or there’s psychological safety issue.”
“…once we’ve delegated, the most important thing is to actually let go.”
Episode highlights
Why decision quantity matters as much as quality
Everyone talks about making better decisions, but Lia flips the frame: the number of decisions you make every day is just as important as the quality of any single one. When you are making every call in your business, you are signaling to your team that you want to make every call. That single habit sits in the top three signs of micromanagement.
Three things constant decision-making tells your team
Lia breaks down what your team reads from the pattern when you own every decision. First, they assume you want it that way. Second, it signals that making a wrong call carries a real consequence, which kills psychological safety. Third, it forces everyone to stop and wait for your input before anything moves forward. That idle waiting time is not free. Translated to hourly rates across your whole team, it is a measurable dollar amount being lost.
The one-way door vs. two-way door mental model
To sort which decisions belong with you and which can be handed off, Lia uses a simple framework: is this a one-way door or a two-way door? Two-way door decisions (website copy, a social post, a color swatch) can be reversed. Those can and should be delegated. One-way door decisions carry a more lasting impact, and even those should be questioned: do you need an operations manager, a chief of staff, or a line manager so fewer of them land on your desk? The goal is to get at least 50 percent of your current decision load off your plate.
Step zero before you delegate: set expectations with yourself first
Before handing anything off, Lia says you have to get clear on what you actually need to see in order to feel comfortable stepping back. Do you want to review the deck before the executive meeting? Do you need a two-sentence recap afterward? Sorting this out in your own head before the conversation means you will not drift back in mid-project and accidentally undermine the person you just empowered.
How to hand off a decision so your team member actually owns it
Once you know what you need, communicate it clearly upfront. Frame the handoff around what is in it for the team member: growth, visibility, the chance to step up. Then name the specific checkpoints. Lia gives a real example: “I am handing off this executive review. I would like to see the slides, and a two-sentence recap after the meeting.” That may feel heavy-handed in the moment, but it is far less disempowering than pinging someone repeatedly after the fact asking how it went.
Setting those expectations also gives you something concrete to reference if the handoff does not go as planned. You are not giving vague feedback after the fact. You are pointing back to a clear agreement.
The most important step: actually let go
Delegating and then secretly making the decision anyway is worse than not delegating at all. It wastes your team member’s time and signals you do not trust them. Once you have handed off a decision and set the expectations, your job is to step back. Check in through the channels you agreed on, and then let the person run. The more decisions your team members own, the more they feel like leaders. Autonomy and engagement follow directly from trust.
The bottom-line case for fewer decisions
If your team is sitting idle waiting for your approval, that is money being lost. If you are stepping away from high-value strategy work to approve a LinkedIn post, that is your effective hourly rate being spent in the wrong place. Reducing the number of decisions you make is not just a culture play. It is one of the most direct levers you have for improving the financial performance of your team or business.
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 225: How to stop being the bottleneck on every decision your team makes. When your team brings every decision to you for final sign-off, you are doing two jobs at once and your team is never building real ownership. Lia’s fix is to articulate your own decision-making process, then deliberately offload specific decisions with a simple communication system so you stay informed without staying in the weeds. This episode is especially useful for founders and team leads whose capable people are still waiting on them before moving forward.
- 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.
Want to go deeper?
The Unstoppable Team. How to build a team that runs without you in the room.
Full transcript (click to expand)
Most decisions that we have to make day to day, they’re two-way doors. Meaning we make the call, we don’t love it. That website copy, you know, the social media post, we can just change it. We can update it. We wanna be making sure most of these two-way door decisions, these can be delegated. And then out of the one-way door, the things that have a more lasting impact. Figuring out, well, who do we need on our team so that we can make fewer of those?
Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where I bring a decade of experience working in some of the most influential companies in tech to help you navigate the ins and outs of being a people manager from conflicts to feedback, to delegating and more. We will leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it and everything in between. Doesn’t matter if you’re a new manager looking for some tips or a seasoned manager looking up their game.
Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. Let’s go. Let’s go, let’s go. Welcome back to the show. Today we are talking about how making fewer decisions makes you a better manager. So all of this talk, I know we often talk about we wanna make quality decisions. It’s all about the quality, it’s all about making better decisions. Yeah, I agree totally. For sure. And, and, and, and it also has to do with the quantity of decisions.
Because if we are making every single decision every single day about every aspect of our business, we are disempowering our team members and we’re creating more work for ourselves, it’s like a lose lose altogether. So today let’s talk about how to reduce the quantity of decisions. Now, why is it so important to reduce the quantity of decisions? Well, when I talk about what are the big flags that we’re micromanaging, making every single decision is literally one of the top three.
Because if we are making every single decision in our business, it means a number of things. First, that we are making it seem like we wanna make every single decision. Because if team members felt like they could make decisions, then they probably would be. That’s a signal that our team members think that we want to be making every decision next. It might mean that we haven’t made it safe for other people to make decisions. Like they’re worried if they get it wrong, there’s gonna be some consequence.
They’re gonna be penalized, they’re gonna be fired. They might, whatever it is. So when we’re making all the decisions, it’s a signal that we haven’t made it safe for people to make mistakes. That means there’s no psychological safety or, or there’s psychological safety issue. So we don’t wanna have that last when we’re making every single decision. We’re not letting our team members be in power to step up as leaders to bring an ownership mindset, to feel autonomous around their work and like, okay, I had this idea, I’m gonna make this call.
No, because they have to stop at every single step to get your buy-in. Then that points to another issue that it slows things down. Really, really slowing your business. It makes you a bottleneck. It causes waiting between work, things to be finished between projects. And it relies on you to constantly be checking in. You are spending more time and your team members are spending more time waiting. All of which, which if you kind of looked at the hourly rate for all of that is just sunk cost in waiting for decisions to be made or not having decisions being made on the right place.
So this is actually why this is such a key piece of the ops playbook, because the ops playbook is all about optimizing the time things take across your business. That’s why we talk about work tracking. That’s why we talk about onboarding. And decision making, making sure that the right people are making decisions at the right time to move the ball forward. Well, that is money that’s either invested in the right place or being wasted by that idle time People are using up, waiting for you to make the calls when you have a million things to do.
So maybe you can’t make the call at that right moment. This is why we wanna optimize decision making and essentially why we want you to be making fewer decisions. Now, how do we know which decisions to make? The first thing I like to do with business owners and managers and team leaders is to get a sense of, well, what are all the kinds of decisions that have to be made in a weekly basis or monthly or daily, whatever it is in your business or on your team, because we have to get our head around it in order to do something about it.
Pause this episode and sit down and think, okay, what are the different kinds of decisions that I’m making on a daily basis? Between strategy and priorities, approving copy, social media. It could be decisions big or small. You really just want to get a full picture around what all the decisions are. Maybe you’re approving job descriptions. Maybe you’re p proving LinkedIn post. Maybe you’re approving color swatches for the website. Update. Whatever it is. Write it down. Now that you have a list of what are all the kinds of decisions you want to circle, only ones that you, you, you alone can make.
And if it’s all of the decisions, you haven’t done the exercise, right? Because these aren’t the ones that only you can make. These are the ones that only you can make today. But you wanna circle the ones that, in a ideal world, you have all the people in place so that only these ones are left with you. And I heard a metaphor recently that I really liked when it came to decision making. Is this a one-way door or a two-way door?
Most decisions that we have to make day-to-day, they’re two-way doors. Meaning we make the call, we don’t love it. That website copy, you know, the social media post, we can just change it. We can update it. We wanna be making sure most of these two-way door decisions, these can be delegated. And then out of the one-way door, the things that have a more lasting impact, figuring out, well, who do we need on our team so that we can make fewer of those.
Maybe you need an operations manager. Maybe you need a chief of staff. Maybe you need someone in that kind of line manager role so that you don’t have to be in the weeds. But we wanna be making fewer of these one-way door decisions because these are perfect opportunities for people to step up and demonstrate thought leadership, to be able to bring different perspectives, different ideas, into the decision making and to get you out of the weeds.
So now that we’ve identified the kinds of decisions that we can be delegating, okay, hopefully it’s at least 50% of the decisions I’m gonna challenge you to find at least half the decisions can be delegated. Now, you wanna think about what expectations do you need to set in order to feel like, yeah, I can hand off these decisions. And this is actually a step zero before delegating, because sometimes we start delegating. We say like, Hey, here’s, here’s what I would do here, and go ahead, we’re on with it.
We set the expectations, but then we realized we didn’t actually fully set them with ourselves. When we set expectations around a decision that we wanna delegate, we have to think about what do I need to see as a leader to feel comfortable stepping away? When does this person need to check in? What kind of status do I wanna see? Let’s say we wanna delegate an executive review to a team member to get some new exposure and visibility, and it’s a great opportunity for them.
But we really wanna see that deck before they go to the meeting. Or we delegate an important client review, and we really want to do a prep call with that employee before they do it to make sure we’re all on the same page, rather what they’re gonna tell the client. If we wanna do that, we wanna figure that out upfront so that we can communicate that when we hand off this decision and then it doesn’t later seem like we kind of changed our mind or the person didn’t do it right and now we’re jumping back in.
So once we figure out in our minds what we need to see in order to delegate, then we communicate that to the team member that we’ve identified can take on this decision. So we grab that team member, we say, I’m excited to be able to hand off this decision. I want you to step up as a leader. You’ve been asking for opportunity to step up and then this is a great one, right? We really wanna frame it and what’s in it for that person.
And then we set that expectation. I’m handing off this executive review and. I wanted to, you know, set expectations around a couple things that I’m gonna need to check in on, just so that I have the right visibility. Let’s do a pre-meeting before the executive review, I would just like to see the slide sign off and then run with it. And afterwards, it’d be great if you can send me a quick two, two sentence recap on how the meeting went.
Okay. That might feel heavy handed, but you know what feels more heavy handed? Checking with the person constantly after the meeting. Like, how’d it go? I haven’t heard back from you. Let me see the deck. Like that’s where people feel disempowered. So even when it feels like, well, I feel like I should let go more, I wanna be letting go more. If there are things that we need to see and we need to know as that team leader, as that manager, as that business owner, we just gotta say it and then our team member will rise the occasion.
And then, because you’ve set expectations now, if you’re not seeing that thing after you have something to come back to. So you can say, Hey, as we talked about before that exec review, I need to see the Dak. Um, next time. Can we make sure to prepare for that or before the client meeting? Hey, as we talked about, we need to go over talking points for the client meeting to make sure that everything’s been covered. Please make 15 minutes next time before the meeting.
I will make sure to carve out time for that. So by setting clear expectations, now we have some groundwork laid. If we do have to give feedback because we have something to come back to. Last but not least, when you are letting go of decisions, you gotta let it go. Okay. We gotta really, really let it go. If we want to be making fewer decisions, empowering our team members to make more decisions, we have to actually not secretly make that decision anyway.
So once we’ve delegated it, once we’ve set those expectations, we let it go and we can check in after and say, how did it go? We can have been looped in along the way by setting those expectations. But we have to take a step back. That’s going to free us up. That’s gonna actually give us more time to reinvest into our business. That’s gonna actually let us focus on bigger, more one-way door important decisions. If we don’t really let go, we’re still doing the same thing.
Only we’ve actually disempowered someone by pretending they were gonna make a decision and then not trusting them to do it. So once we’ve delegated, the most important thing is to actually let go. This is going to be transformational for your team because the more decisions your team members get to make, the more they feel like owners. I feel autonomy. I’m excited. I can, I can bring my creative ideas. I’m a leader in the space. My manager trusts me to make the calls.
So this is such an important thing to be doing to increase engagement on your team and to be optimizing time because if your team member is waiting, For you to find that email and make that caller, make the time to have that meeting and they’re sitting there idly. That is time, money that can be reinvest in your business. And if you are having to stop what you’re doing, working with clients and doing that high, high strategy visibility work and jump in to look at some social media copy, that hourly rate that you could be charging that’s being invested in the wrong place.
So one of the biggest reasons that we need to be making fewer decisions, it’s a bottom line perspective. We are actually losing money in our business on our teams by having to be too much in the weeds and making fewer decisions is one of the biggest ways to change this and turn this around. See you next time. I know you’re here because you want to be a better manager, but I also know it’s often easier said than done.
That’s why I put together a scorecard of 20 things that you can do this month and every month to show up better for your team as a manager, from positive feedback to recognition, to honoring those working norms that we know we gotta do, but sometimes forget. This scorecard serves as a checklist and accountability buddy, to remind you of all those things you gotta do to be a great manager. Download your copy today at liagarvin.com/scorecard. That’s all I have for today.
Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple Podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive. I always love to hear from you, so please reach out at liagarvin.com or message me on LinkedIn. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
How do I stop being a bottleneck as a manager or business owner?
The fix is making fewer decisions yourself. When you make every call, your team has to stop and wait for you at every step, which slows everything down and costs real money in idle time. Start by listing all the decisions you make weekly, then circle only the ones that truly require you. Challenge yourself to delegate at least half. The goal is to reserve your energy for high-stakes, hard-to-reverse decisions and hand the rest to your team so work keeps moving without you in the middle of everything.
What is the one-way door vs two-way door framework for delegating decisions?
A two-way door decision is one you can reverse if it does not work out, like website copy or a social media post. Those can and should be delegated. A one-way door decision has a more lasting impact and is harder to undo. As a leader, you want to focus your attention on one-way door decisions and delegate the two-way door ones to your team. Most day-to-day decisions are two-way doors, which means most decisions in your business can be handed off.
How do I delegate a decision without having to jump back in later?
Before you hand anything off, get clear with yourself on what you actually need to see to feel comfortable stepping away. Do you want to review a deck beforehand? Do you need a two-sentence recap after a meeting? Decide that first, then communicate it clearly when you delegate. When expectations are set upfront, your team member knows exactly what to deliver and you have something to refer back to if you need to give feedback later. Vague handoffs lead to jumping back in. Clear expectations prevent that.
Why does making every decision on my team mean I'm micromanaging?
When you make every decision, you send two signals to your team: that you want to be involved in everything, and that it is not safe for them to make a call and get it wrong. Both signals kill autonomy and engagement. Team members stop bringing ownership or creative ideas because they know everything has to go through you anyway. Making every decision is one of the clearest signs of micromanagement, and fixing it starts with identifying which decisions you can hand off and actually trusting your team to handle them.
What should I say to a team member when I want to delegate more decisions to them?
Frame it around what is in it for them. Say something like: I want you to step up as a leader, and this is a great opportunity to do that. Then be direct about the expectations attached. For example: I am handing off this client review. I would like to do a quick prep call beforehand and get a two-sentence recap after. That framing gives your team member visibility, ownership, and clear guardrails, which makes it easier for them to rise to the occasion instead of guessing what you want.