It's 7:40 in the morning and your phone is already lighting up.

"Quick question. Should we push the release or ship it as is?"

"The customer is asking for the report early. OK to send it?"

"Do you want us to loop in the platform team on this?"

Every one of these is easy for you. You answer them in seconds. And honestly, it feels good. You're being responsive. You're being helpful. You're adding value.

But here's the uncomfortable part.

It's 7:40 in the morning, and not one decision has been made on your team without you.

Most managers look at this and think they have a people problem. "My team just isn't stepping up."

I want to challenge that.

In almost every case I see, this is not a people problem. It's a leadership system problem.

And that's actually great news. Because you control the system.

I worked with a manager recently who was about three months into a new team. He was feeling proud of his responsiveness. Any question that came in, he answered within minutes. Nights, weekends, didn't matter.

Then he took one day off for his kid's school event.

One day.

He came back to fourteen messages, two stalled projects, and a team that had essentially stopped moving. Nobody had made a single meaningful decision while he was gone.

His team wasn't lazy. They weren't incapable. They were doing exactly what he had trained them to do.

Think about how learning works on a team. Teams learn the behavior that their leader reinforces. Every time someone brought him a question, he gave a fast, confident, high-quality answer. From the team's perspective, escalating was rewarded every single time. It was fast. It was safe. It worked.

So they did more of it.

He wasn't building a decisive team. He was running a very effective training program for learned helplessness.

This is not about blame. It's about ownership.

If your team escalates everything to you, you didn't do it on purpose. But you did train it. And that's the most hopeful thing I can tell you, because if you trained this behavior, you can retrain it.

Here's the belief shift at the center of all of this:

Your job as a leader is not to make every decision. Your job is to teach your team how to be decisive.

Every escalation that comes to you is a training opportunity. Right now you're spending those reps making yourself stronger. We're going to start spending them making your team stronger.

Here's what that looks like.

Someone comes to you and says, "Hey, the customer is pushing back on the timeline. What do you want us to do?"

The old you answers the question.

The new you asks one.

"What do you recommend we do here?"

That's it. That's the move. Sometimes I'll ask it slightly differently: "What does your gut tell you?"

These questions are not a quiz. I'm not withholding the answer to make a point. I'm genuinely inviting them into the decision, and I'm lowering the stakes while I do it.

Here's what happens next, and this may surprise you at first.

The vast majority of the time, the person already has a good answer. They just wanted permission. Or cover. Or reassurance.

And when their answer is good, or even just good enough, I tell them so: "That sounds right to me. Go with it."

Do not fall into the trap of polishing their answer. If their call gets you most of the way there, resist the urge to add your ten percent. Every time you rewrite their decision, you teach them their judgment isn't good enough. And they'll be back at your desk tomorrow.

Now, sometimes the person genuinely is stuck. The decision feels big, the unknowns feel too large. That's when I ask: "What's one small step we could take in the direction we believe we need to go?"

They can almost always answer that.

A decision is just the best hypothesis you have right now. The action is the test. You take the step, get feedback, adjust, and keep moving. When your team internalizes that, the fear of decision-making comes way down. They stop waiting for the perfect answer and start generating momentum.

There's a second half to this retraining, and if you skip it, everything falls apart.

The first time someone on your team makes a call on their own and it goes sideways, you are at a fork in the road.

If you get frustrated, if you second-guess them in front of others, if you grab control back, you have just retrained the escalation behavior. Except now it's worse, because they trusted you and got burned.

So when their call goes wrong, you own it. You back them publicly. You absorb the heat from above.

This is the ownership mindset, and this is exactly where it earns its keep.

General Stanley McChrystal tells a story about his time in Iraq, where his staff would wake him at four in the morning to approve strikes on enemy targets. He'd hear the intel and give the same answer every time: "Yes. Take the shot."

Eventually he realized his team had all the information he had. His approval wasn't adding value. It was just slowing everyone down.

So he told them: "Stop waking me up. If the intel supports it, make the call. If it's wrong, it's the same mistake I would have made."

Think about how much safety is packed into that last sentence.

He didn't just hand them the decision. He pre-committed to owning the outcome with them. That's what made his team faster. And that's what will make your team decisive.

After the action, you debrief. Not a formal review. Five minutes, right after the event, while it's still fresh.

Three questions:

The goal is not to judge the decision. The goal is to learn from it together.

Every escalation that reaches you should teach the team something that makes the next one unnecessary. Maybe the debrief reveals they didn't know a customer commitment existed. Now they do. Maybe they weren't sure they had the authority to act. Now they are. Maybe your expectations were never as clear as you thought. Now you fix that.

Each debrief closes a gap. Each closed gap means fewer decisions need you.

Do this consistently and you're not just fixing an escalation problem. You're building a team that learns from its own actions, every week, compounding over time.

Six months from now, your team is going to be either more dependent on you or more decisive.

There is no standing still.

Every question you answer today is a vote for one of those futures.

So the next time someone walks up with a quick question, hear it for what it really is.

A training rep. Spend it on them.

Best, 

Jeff

P.S. If you're leading a new team right now and feel like nothing moves unless you're in the room, book a complimentary call with me. This is not a sales call. This is a help call. We'll talk through the decisions piling up on your desk and figure out where to start retraining the team. I'm taking all of these calls myself right now, so grab a time while you can. Here’s a link to my calendar.

P.P.S. We are moving to a new platform for hosting the Bellamy Letter. If you would like to continue receive this every Wednesday, please click here and opt-in to the new platform. I look forward to continuing to connect with you every week!