Your team has the SOPs. They know the process.
They’re smart, and every real decision still somehow lands back on your desk.
You’ve told yourself it’s a hiring problem. Maybe a training problem. It’s neither.
You’ve been handing them the answer instead of the thinking that got you there.
What is really going on
Dawn opens this one from her own desk, thirty minutes deep into rewriting a team member’s show note titles instead of just telling her what she saw and why. That’s the whole episode in miniature.
The longer you lead, the more your judgment turns into instinct, and instinct feels like, well, instinct to you.
To your team, it looks like magic, like you somehow just know.
If what you know only lives as a feeling instead of a set of criteria, it isn’t transferable yet, no matter how many SOPs are written down.
The fix isn’t teaching your team to think exactly like you. A room full of your clones doesn’t scale a business. It just delays the day everyone finds out nobody can think without you.
In this episode:
- Why handing someone the right answer, over and over, never actually counts as delegation, and quietly keeps you the bottleneck
- The five questions that turn your gut instinct into criteria your team can actually learn from
- Why the same exercise that makes your team sharper is also what makes AI genuinely useful, instead of just a faster typist
The framework
Before you answer the next “what should I do,” walk through five things, either out loud with them or in your own head first.
- What are we actually deciding?
- What matters most here? Speed, margin, relationships, brand, risk, reversibility?
- What trade-off are we making, and what are we willing to accept less of?
- What pattern or experience is shaping my gut right now? Name it out loud.
- What would you decide? Ask them first. Don’t reveal your answer early.
The difference shows up fast.
“Go with vendor B” teaches nothing. “Vendor B is cheaper” teaches a little. But “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” teaches reversibility, stage, cash, and priorities all at once, and that reasoning travels with them.
Every answer you give solves today’s problem. Showing someone how you got there solves the next twenty years of problems.
Try this this week
Next time someone asks “what should I do,” don’t answer first. Ask them to walk you through their thinking. Just once. Notice what it reveals about what’s missing for them, and about what you’ve never actually said out loud.
If this isn’t just one manager, if it’s showing up across your whole leadership team, that’s not a hiring problem, it’s a capability gap. That’s exactly the work Dawn does through executive coaching and custom leadership development. Details in the show notes.
Resources
- Free guide: 10 Ways AI Will Make You a Better Leader
Chapters
- [00:00] The Thirty Minutes She Didn’t Need to Spend
- [00:03] Why “They Know This Stuff” Isn’t the Real Question
- [00:06] You Cannot Delegate Judgment By Repeating the Answer
- [00:08] The Five Questions That Make Instinct Teachable
- [00:11] Same Exercise, Different Payoff: What This Means for AI
Related Episodes
- 207 | Why Trying to Be a “Good Leader” Won’t Help You Lead Better and the 4 Questions That Will
- 201 | Why Teaching AI Your Voice First Might Be the Wrong Strategy | Leadership, Delegation & Systems with AI Frameworks
- 132 | How Female Founders Delegate High-Stakes Tasks Without Losing Sleep (Using DiSC + AI Pattern Recognition)
“You cannot delegate judgment by repeatedly supplying the correct answer. If you want your people thinking independently, they need access to the criteria you’re using to think, not just the output of that thinking.”
