AUA: How Do Leaders Stop Being The Decision Bottleneck?
About this episode:
Original Air Date: August 31 2026It happens gradually: a leader makes one call that should have been decided by one of their reports, then another, until the whole team has quietly stopped deciding anything without “checking in” first. By the time the bottleneck is discovered, it feels like just how things are now and any change feels uncomfortable for everyone.
In this week’s AUA, Rodney and Sam answer a listener’s question about how to catch yourself before you become that bottleneck, navigating the discomfort when handing decision rights back to where they belong, and the “freedom and consequences” philosophy behind delegating tough choices.
Mentioned in this episode:
“founder mode ep”: AWWTR Ep. 22
In this episode:
Rodney Evans
Sam Spurlin
Listen now:
Episode transcript:
Sam Spurlin:
Hey everyone. Welcome back to At Work with The Ready. I'm Sam Spurlin and I'm joined as always by Rodney Evans.
Rodney Evans:
Hey, Sam.
Sam Spurlin:
Every other week we're tackling one tough thought-provoking listener question and sharing a few ideas we think might help. Let's dive in. Rodney, what have you got for us this week?
Rodney Evans:
How can leaders tell when they've inadvertently set a precedent that all decisions need to be elevated to them and how can they make themselves more comfortable letting reports make decisions themselves?
Sam Spurlin:
So when I think about leaders that I have worked with, that I have coached, a couple of things come to mind listening to them talk about this exact experience. One is that you hear them saying something along the lines of, or agreeing with me when I say it, that they're playing at a level below what they should be. And that is a felt sense I think a lot of the time. When I think about my title and what somebody with my title should be doing, why does it feel like I'm actually doing the job of someone a title or two below me? And that's usually a sign that you're in the weeds in places that you shouldn't be.
And I guess that does require a certain amount of self-awareness to even feel that way. I could imagine a less self-aware leader being like, "Well, this is just what I do. We got to have a high quality. Obviously everything has to come through me. I'm here wheeling and dealing, making decisions. That's what someone like me is supposed to do. " And then the other is, and I think this is a much clearer one, is if you feel like you can't ever do your real work because you're always in the weeds, that's certainly a sign that you have made yourself indispensable in a bad way. Do you have a alternative take on that or how do you do the second part, which is helping your team make more decisions themselves?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. So my take on the first part that is only slightly different than yours is because this person said how they've inadvertently set a precedent, here's what I see a lot is when I am talking to a leader who knows too much. Like they know about everything that's going on and they know the detail and the tactics of shit that they should not know about. I'm like, "You are in those decisions." Even if someone is not coming to you and saying, "Sam, can I get your approval on this? Sam, is this yes or no? Sam, what..." the fact that you know that much means that you are implicitly making some kind of call because they're showing you that shit and what you're not doing is "That looks neat, off you pop." I guarantee you are doing something active that looks like exercising power when you have become scrubbed in to a psychotic amount of detail in your company.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. But Rodney, founder mode. Founder mode, Rodney.
Rodney Evans:
Fucking founder mode. Let's just -
Sam Spurlin:
Also, we have an episode on that too.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, we hate it. We basically hate it. Yeah. So I think that one way to know if you've inadvertently done this is that you know too much and you are never surprised by anything. And when you're at an offsite and a bunch of people do presentations, you've already seen them all. That means that you are making the calls. So stop doing that. Yeah, stop doing it. Stop. Yeah. Okay.
And then to the second part, I used to work with a guy at a client, a very, very senior dude, and he had this sort of philosophy that he called freedom and consequences. And he believed in it both at work and as a parent. And he was like, "You give people as much freedom as you can and they endure the consequences of what they do with that freedom." And I think that's a pretty good philosophy for how you make yourself more comfortable and make your reports more comfortable with making those decisions.
It's like part of the move is making clear what they can make the call on. We've talked about that nine bajillion times on this show. But part of it is also that if you're not making the decision as the leader either implicitly or explicitly or just through magic sprinkles and being involved in everything...if you're not doing that, you also are not insulating people from the consequences of their behavior which is right. People should be in contact with the environment that surrounds them. When they make a decision that's bad, they should feel...bad.
Sam Spurlin:
The results.
Rodney Evans:
The bad. They should feel the results. They should get the "find out" of the "fuck around" equation. And so I just think that the motion is to convey that to people and then truly to let them experience the upside and the downside of the decisions that they make, or they will never get great at being decision makers like you are. Not you, Sam, the leader in this.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, I'm garbage. I love that. My just very tactical thing that I have done with some leaders who are wrestling with this is I ask them to just keep a log of all the decisions they're being asked to make in a given week. Literally just write down who asked you to decide what. So we have a big list of them and then we can look at that list together and start to A, see patterns about what sorts of things are coming to them for decisions. But B, also start to interrogate, well, which of these should you retain decision rights on? What is it about these ones versus these other ones that you feel like you should not be? And then we can start asking ourselves, okay, well, what is it that is getting in the way of your folks being able to make these decisions?
Is it that they don't have the mastery? They literally just don't have the skills to know what the decision is. Well, okay, if that's the case, then the way we intervene on that is going to be different than if they have the skills, but they don't just have access to the information that they need to make those decisions. That's a different set of interventions. And you can start to be much more kind of surgical about how do we get folks comfortable with the idea of making these types of decisions? Because a lot of times we just have this felt sense that decisions are being made that I shouldn't have to make, but we haven't actually written them down so we can look at them. It's just this vague sense. So I think a good first step is just getting them down on paper so that we can start to ask questions about them.
Rodney Evans:
I love it. Write stuff down.
Sam Spurlin:
All right. That is it for this mini. If you've got a question of your own, hit us up at podcast[at]theready[dot]com.
Rodney Evans:
And we will see you back next week for a full episode of At Work with The Ready. Thank you so much for being a listener.