She’s That Founder
211 | Why Your Team Still Brings Every Decision Back to You
Your team isn't asking you, "What should I do?" because they can't think. They're asking because you've never actually shown them how you do
Hey, Hey, Hey. You're listening to She's That Founder, the podcast for ambitious female leaders who are ready to stop being the bottleneck in their businesses by using AI frameworks for faster delegation and decision-making.
I'm Dawn Andrews, and today you'll discover why telling your team the right answer over and over isn't actually transferring any information or skills that they can use the next time, the five questions that turn your gut instinct into something your team can actually learn from, and why the exact same exercise that makes your team sharper is also the thing that makes AI genuinely useful to you instead of just a faster typist
So a few weeks ago, I was sitting at my desk with a set of show notes open in Google Docs, squeezing the review in between client calls, like I do with half the things in my business.
Jurie had sent me the notes and the title options, and they were good. Like, really good. But I opened the doc and immediately thought, "These are good, but this sounds a little too corporate. It's a little too general. This title is talking at people instead of to one person. This needs to sound a little more like me, my clients, the conversations that I'm actually having in real life."
And so I started tweaking. I cut a word, I changed another, I moved a phrase. I the title, and then I looked up and 30 minutes had gone by. 30 minutes to make something that was already good maybe 5% better. And this is the part that got me. I sent the finished version back to Jurie and moved on.
I didn't say, "Here are the things I changed and why." I didn't explain what I was seeing. I didn't give her anything she could use to make the next version better. I just fixed it. And girl, I know you're editing this right now, so I'm just sending you my love and a big old fat apology. And I did all of that because I was impatient.
I had another client call coming, It felt just much faster to change those six words myself than stop and figure out how to explain what I was seeing and why I wanted to change them. And to be fair, some of what I'm seeing is 25 years of accumulated experience and reading and life compressed into instinct.
I know when something sounds too corporate, too general, when we're pushing information at people instead of talking to one person, talking to you. And I know when something could have my name on it, but there's nothing on it that could've come from me. And what I don't always know is how to take all of that and turn it into a neat little instruction that somebody else can follow.
So I do what a lot of experienced leaders do, I use the judgment instead of transferring the judgment. And then lo and behold, I'm still the person making the same decision next time, which is ridiculous, because I don't wanna own this forever. If Jurie fully owned it, she would have a growth and learning opportunity for herself, and it would be an incredible relief.
There would be space for expansion, and there is so much more that I could be doing and so much more that we both could be doing. But I'm not gonna get there or get her there by making the next set of show notes 5% better. I have to slow down long enough to make some of what I know visible. And once I saw that, I realized this wasn't really a copy problem, it was an expert problem.
It was a leader problem, and also an expert problem. So I'm gonna break down what I think is actually happening, because on the surface it looks like it's an issue with your team. You've hired smart people, they know their jobs, they know the process. Most of you, many of you have SOPs written out, and the complicated decisions still land right back on your desk. " What do you think? Which one should we go with? Can you just look at this real quick? Are you okay with this? I wasn't sure what you want here, so I waited."
I'm imagining you've heard any or many of those, and somewhere in there you've thought, "They know this stuff. Why do they still need me here?" Here's what I think is actually going on. The more experienced you become, the more this happens. You look at something and you just know, like, nope, something's wrong.
Wrong client, wrong number, wrong tone, wrong risk. And you don't need a checklist. You don't need to run a checklist to do that, you just feel it. And the catch is that what feels like instinct to you is that 20 years, or 10, or five of pattern recognition firing underneath the surface so fast that you don't even clock it happening anymore, and you experience it as your instinct or intuition.
Your team experiences it as, "Dawn somehow just knows." And I see this with the founders and executives that I coach who are brilliant operators who've built their whole reputation on having great instincts, Who never once slowed down to ask what's actually inside that instinct.
And if you can't slow down and make that thing visible, the judgment stays trapped exactly where it always has been, which is inside you. If your expertise lives entirely inside your intuition, it isn't transferable yet. And I wanna be clear about something before we go further, because this next part changes everything about how you fix this.
Quick break. Gotta keep the lights on
So I'm taking a pause because in a few minutes we're gonna talk about how this exact same exercise makes AI dramatically more useful in your business. And if you want the fuller picture on that, grab the free guide, 10 Ways AI Will Make You a Better Leader. It's a genuinely practical starting point, not just theory, and you can just begin today.
You don't need a big wind-up for it. The link's in the show notes. Go grab it.
And we're back. Here's where it gets useful. Okay, this is the mistake I think most of us make, myself included, for a long time. We think we've transferred knowledge because we've told someone what to do.
We handed them the conclusion, the process, the rule, the correction, the answer, but what we didn't hand them was how we got there. And this is the big idea underneath all of it. You cannot delegate judgment by repeatedly supplying the correct answer.
If you actually want your people thinking independently, they need access to the criteria you're using to think, not just the output of that thinking So I wanna head something off before it turns into the wrong lesson. This is not about teaching everyone to make the exact decision you make.
That doesn't build a team. That builds a room full of clones, and clones don't scale a business. They just delay the day you find out that nobody can think without you. The goal is for your people to understand what actually matters so they can exercise sound judgment when you're not in the room.
Sometimes that means they'll make a different call than you would have. Sometimes they'll F it up real bad. But that is not a failure. That is the whole point. And this is the behavior change that goes along with this, and it's simpler than it sounds, even though it's genuinely hard to do in the moment.
So everyone. Godspeed. The next time someone comes to you and says, "What should I do?" resist answering right away. Ask instead, "Walk me through how you're thinking about it." And then actually listen, not for the right answer. Like, listen for their thinking, for what's missing, missing information, criteria, a misunderstood priority, some risk that they're over-weighting or under-weighting, a gap in context that they never had access to.
You're coaching the thinking, not just handing over the answer. And I'll say that harder part out loud because it's real. Exposing your thinking takes longer than just answering, because you need to understand theirs first to further share yours. And sometimes it means admitting out loud, " I don't actually know.
Here's what I'm weighing." And that can feel genuinely uncomfortable if any part of your authority has been built on always knowing. But showing your team how good decisions might actually get made under uncertainty is one of the most valuable things you will ever teach them. Every answer you give solves today's problem, but showing someone how you arrived there might solve for the next 20 years.
Okay, so how do you actually do this in real time without turning every question into a 45-minute seminar? I've got a framework for you.
Okay. When someone brings you a decision, instead of answering right away, walk through five things, either out loud with them or in your own head first if you need the practice.
One, what are we actually deciding? You'd be shocked how often two people think they're solving the same problem when they're not even close. Two, what matters most here? Is it speed, margin, client relationships, brand, risk, the people involved, long-term consequences versus short-term, reversibility? Name the actual criteria out loud.
Three, what trade-off are we making? Every decision that actually matters costs something. What are you choosing more of and what are you willing to accept less of? Four, and this one matters the most for those of you who've been doing this for a long time, what pattern or experience is influencing my judgment right now?
I've seen this three times before, and here's what happened each time, for instance. The second you say that sentence, your intuition stops being a mystery and becomes teachable context. And five, what would you decide? Ask the other person, and don't reveal the answer too early. Let them actually reason it through.
Then compare your thinking to theirs, not just your answer to theirs
Okay, let me show you the difference this makes because it's honestly kind of stark. Bad transfer of judgment sounds like, " Go with vendor B." Slightly better sounds like, "Vendor B is cheaper." But real judgment transfer sounds like, " I'd choose B even though A has better capabilities because this decision is reversible, we're still testing demand, and protecting cash matters more right now than optimizing the final system.
If demand proves out, I'd revisit it." That one sentence just taught someone about reversibility, stage, cash, experimentation, and priorities all at the same time, and that reasoning travels with them. It'll show up again in a completely different decision six months from now.
If you're a founder or a leader, this is the tacit knowledge sitting entirely in your head. Which clients are actually right for you, what good looks like, when something feels off-brand, when to push and when to bend, and how much risk is reasonable. None of that is written down anywhere, which means your company can literally not run without direct access to you.
And if you're operating inside a larger organization, it's the same problem at an even bigger scale. You simply can't personally sit in every consequential decision anymore. Your actual job becomes building people and systems that can exercise good judgment farther and farther away from you. That's leverage.
And here's where this gets really interesting, especially for those of us that are building businesses with AI-enabled businesses. If you've ever told AI, "Write this like I would," you actually haven't given it judgment. You've given it your voice, maybe. Maybe you've shared some blog posts, some social posts, articles you've written.
So you've given it your voice, but not your thinking. But if you can actually articulate what matters, what good looks like, what you reject, what trade-offs you typically make, what contexts change your answers, and where a human absolutely still needs to be in the loop, AI gets dramatically more useful very fast.
It's the exact same exercise that makes your team sharper. We're early adopters over here for a reason, and this is one of the clearest examples of why. And in a previous episode, I talked about answering 110 questions with a tool that I created to build out my AI judgment. It's totally possible, and it will change your life.
Because your job isn't to create people who make your decisions, your job is to create people capable of making good decisions without you. So here's what we covered, Lovey. You've probably been handing your team answers and assuming that counted as transferred knowledge, the reasoning underneath the answer is the actual thing worth handing over.
The fix isn't teaching people to think exactly like you. It's exposing what you're weighing so they can build judgment of their own, and the tool for that is simple. What are we deciding? What matters most? What's the trade-off? What pattern is shaping my gut? And what would you decide before I say anything or give an answer?
This week, I want you to catch yourself the next time someone asks, "What should I do?" And before you answer them, ask them to walk you through their thinking first, just once. See what it reveals about what they're missing, and honestly, about what you've never actually said out loud. And if you're listening to this thinking, "This isn't just one manager.
This is happening across my whole leadership team," That's not a hire better people problem, that's a capability issue, and it's exactly the kind of work I do with organizations through executive coaching and custom leadership development. And if that's where you are, I'd love to talk.
You can find our contact information in the show notes.
The higher your level of leadership, the less useful it actually is for you to personally hold every answer. Your job was never to be the smartest person in every room forever.
I mean, who wants to be that anyway? It's to leave the room and have good thinking happening without you, maybe while you're on a beach somewhere. That's it for today's episode of She's That Founder. I'll check you out on Thursday, and until then, find one place this week where you can show your team how you think instead of just what you do.
Take care, Lovey.
