S1 E33 The One Question That Builds Decision-Makers in Your Trucking Company

In growing trucking companies, a pattern quietly takes hold.

Every question starts going to the owner.

Dispatch asks.
 Payroll asks.
 Safety asks.
 Operations asks.

And over time, the company stops building decision-makers.

It builds escalators.

In this episode of Driven for Success, Mike Ritzema shares a simple leadership shift that starts breaking that pattern.

One question:

“What do you think we should do?”

You’ll learn:

• Why answering questions too quickly reinforces escalation
 • How to start building decision-makers inside your team
 • A simple way to develop independent thinking without creating chaos
 • What to do when your team says, “I don’t know”

If you’re running a trucking company with 20–80 trucks and feel like every decision still comes back to you, this episode will give you something you can start using immediately.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

One of the most common things that I see in growing trucking companies that are now 20 and 30 and 40 trucks is this. Someone brings a problem and the owner immediately gives an answer. It feels efficient, it feels helpful, it feels like leadership. It actually feels heroic. But it's actually reinforcing the exact pattern that slows the company down. Because every time you answer the question, you're training the team to bring the next one to you. Just think of any question that you get in your company. Think of the most recent question that you got. It could be about dispatch or a rate for a load or payroll or should we hire a driver? Any of those things. You probably got the question, you knew the answer right away, and you gave it back. But what did you teach them, your employee, to do? You just taught them to ask you. In the last two episodes, we talked about the escalation habit and the intelligence bottleneck that forms from it, where more and more decisions move upward. And all the thinking ends up in one place, the owner. Today I want to give you something simple that starts breaking that pattern. Welcome to Driven for Success, the podcast where we talk about systems and decisions that help trucking companies grow without the owner being the bottleneck and help us have but less chaos and better drivers. I'm Mike Ritzelma, your host, an owner of Superior Trucking Payroll Service, where our mission is simple to help trucking families. This podcast is one of the ways that we fulfill this mission. If you're running a trucking company somewhere between 20 and 80 trucks, you've probably experienced the stage where it feels like every decision still comes back to you. Today we're going to talk about that one simple shift that changes that. Here's what usually happens someone runs into a situation where a decision has to be made, they're not completely sure what to do. So they come to the owner, and the owner already knows the answer.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

So they give it quickly and efficiently and heroically. Problem solved. Hooray! But something important didn't happen. The other person didn't think through the problem.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

They didn't work through the decision. So they didn't build that muscle. This is an exercise, just like physical exercise is. You have to build that muscle. And so it can be something like a rate decision or a payroll exception. Question about detention pets. They don't think about what to do. They just their way to solve the problem is just to ask you as the owner. And that's not going to scale your company. It's just not going to work because every problem goes through you. That's not what you intended when you started the company with five trucks and now you're up to 35 trucks. You thought people would make their own decisions. Well, they would if they had to. And because you're always there with the answer, they don't have to. The shift is simple. Instead of answering the question immediately, you ask one question.

SPEAKER_00 3:18

What do you think we should do? What do you think we should do?

SPEAKER_01 3:28

That question will get the person asking you to think just a little bit. That one question changes what happens next. Instead of waiting for the answer, the person has to think. They have to process the situation, they have to make a recommendation. Sometimes it won't be complete, sometimes it won't even be right. But now they're engaged in the decision. And that's how you start building decision makers instead of escalators. So just the idea of making them think through it versus just sitting there waiting for you to decide. Even though the wait for you to decide is usually very short, still make them think through it. Your time, for no other reason, your time is more valuable per hour than their time is. So even if they spent a minute on a decision that takes you 10 seconds, that might still be okay. And that minute is going to be less later. So it's really about thinking versus waiting and make them think instead of making them wait. That's really the idea. Let's walk through a simple example. A dispatcher comes to you with a detention situation. The customer may need to be billed. The driver may need to be paid. Normally the dispatcher would ask, What do we do here? And the owner would answer, you know, bill the customer this much, pay the driver that much. Done. But instead, you ask, what do you think we should do? How do you think we should handle this? Now the dispatcher has to think. They might say, Well, the driver waited two hours and our policy is this. So I think we should pay the driver this amount and bill the customer this amount. Now you're not just giving an answer, you're shaping how they think. You might adjust it, you might guide it, but they're doing the work. Now just picture this happening in your company where the dispatcher comes to you with that with that question. And if you said to them, what do you think we should do? Make them come up with the answer. One of the bad possibilities is that they're going to screw it up, of course. But that's how they learn because they haven't, nothing's actually happened yet. You're just having a discussion, and you can help them correct their thinking to be more in line with what you want, which might mean adjusting a policy. It might be reminding them of a policy, might be making a policy. Another thing that could happen is that they might want to bill the customer more. They might say, hey, we've got this thing. We're supposed to bill them$200, not$150. He just made$50 more bucks. Sounds like a win to me. So just imagine them making their own decision. Because the next time they do it, and they come to you with a question, they're going to be prepared for this and they're going to come to you with a decision and they're going to say, hey, we've got this situation with this load and detention. I think we ought to build the customer this much and pay the driver this much. What do you think? Is that okay? It's a much easier question. It's much less mental lifting for you. And that's just the first step. Then pretty soon they don't even ask. You give them the freedom to say, look, you know, with these parameters, you don't even have to ask me. We talked about that in previous episodes, and this is where it really applies. So if you sometimes you're going to get an answer that is not satisfactory. You're going to get, well, shoot, I just don't know. Or I have no idea. And you don't love that answer, but you hired the person because you believe they could do the job. So let's help train them. It's probably a training deficiency. Say something to them like, if I weren't here, what would you do? You know, I'm unreachable. I am up in an airplane with no Wi-Fi. And a decision has to be made right now. What would you do? That forces them to make a decision. And it shifts the mindset from trying to guess it like it's a quiz, what does the owner want me to give for an answer? To what is the right decision? And that's a great way to have them look at it because the right decision should be also what the owner wants, but they'll have to back it up with some thoughts. They'll say, look, well, the policy says this. So that's what I would do. And then that's that's where the magic happens because more often than not, unless your policy is wrong, that's gonna be what you want to do. And you don't have to be bothered with the decision. You can go on to other things. Now, this is one of those solutions that is easy to explain, simple to explain, but it can be hard to execute. And this is the part people don't talk about. This is gonna feel slower at first and not just a little slower. It's gonna feel like everybody's question that used to take 10 seconds now takes two minutes. And that adds up quickly in your day when you had other things to do. It's going to feel very inefficient. You're gonna feel like you're in a slog all day. You're gonna want to just give up and give them the give the person the answer and move on. Because then you can get back to what you were doing more quickly, the dispatcher or the employee can get back to what they were doing more quickly, and it just seems to be a win for everybody, but you're making a trade. Right now, you're gonna the better investment is to trade a little bit of time now for a lot of freedom later. So you you're either gonna get short-term speed now or you're gonna get long-term capacity later, and it's gonna be a huge difference. That that payoff will pay off for the rest of the time people work there, and it's going to be frustrating. I'm I'm not gonna lie to you about it. I've failed on it in my own company, and I have to sometimes remind myself let your people solve the problem. They're capable people. You hired them for a reason. And you know, I want to give them the answer like I'm in a game show, right? You're but you're clicking the buzzer, you're trying to get them to get the right answer. Oh, I know the answer to that question, like it's trivia. That's not what you need to do here. We need to teach the frontline people, the dispatchers, the office people, whoever, even your drivers, just teach them how to think about the way you think about things. Over time, something starts to change if you can do this. People stop bringing you problems without thinking. They're gonna start bringing you solutions, and it won't take that long. They're gonna say things like, here's what I think we should do in this situation. And now, instead of being the person who has to answer the question, you're the person who develops how they answer the question. It is so much better. The difference between someone bringing you a solution and someone be bringing you a problem is night and day. Because you don't even have to put much mental energy, or as one of somebody I know calls it burning mental calories. You don't have to burn many calories on it if they bring you the decision. Oh, shoot. So we've got the situation with this load with detention. We should, I think we should bill the drive, the company, the customer this much and pay the driver this much. And you go, okay. And so much easier then what do we do? Because now you've got to ask information. If you didn't know about the load, you've got to get all the information yourself. Whereas they're gonna learn to bring it to you because now they know how you made the decision, either in formal policy, which is the best way to go, or even if they just listen to the way that you ask questions before you answer the question for them. But you want to be it also helps improve consistency, especially if you have uh policy documents on how we're gonna handle density with this customer or with this driver. All those things make everything consistent, which lowers your chaos, which is such a win. It just lowers the blood pressure for everybody that works there. Here's one thing to try this week. The next time someone brings you a problem, don't answer it immediately. Ask, what do you think we should do? Then listen. Stop and do not interrupt and listen. Let them work through it. Even if it's not perfect, that's okay. Because that's how decision makers are built. So just imagine this. The next time someone comes to you with a question, imagine your person asking you the question and say to them, What do you think we should do? And then stop. That's the key, is the stopping and letting them work through it. And then they'll give you an answer. And the answer may not be perfect, but you can refine it and you'll teach them how to answer the question. It's kind of the teach a man to fish versus giving him fish sort of thing. You make a decision for them, they got a decision right now. You teach them how to make a decision, they're set for life. The companies that grow are not the ones where the owner has all the answers. They're the ones where the team learns how to think. And that shift doesn't happen through big systems, it happens through small moments. One question at a time. So if you feel like everything still depends on you and your business, and you are just working harder and harder and grinding harder and harder because everything has to run through you. Just try this. See what happens. It's a small investment of your time for what can be a big return, both in the independence of your employees and the growth of your company, because your company will grow so much faster when all these decisions can be made by the frontline people. Thanks for listening to Driven's for success. Hey, a quick side note, uh, Matt's is next week in Louisville. We're gonna have a booth, booth 38205 for Superior Trucking Payroll Service. If you're at Matt's, stop by and say hi. Let us know, give us some feedback on the podcast. And if you find this podcast to be helpful, this episode, please like it, please share it, please review it. We're trying to help trucking companies, and you doing those things help us, helps us help more trucking companies. We'll see you next week.