Why Your Team Keeps Waiting For You

A founder told me recently that her team had become passive. Smart people, good hires, and yet everything came back to her for approval. She wanted to know how to make them more proactive.

I asked her one question: what happens when somebody makes a call without checking with you first and gets it wrong?

She thought about it and said, honestly, that she would probably fix it herself and mention it later. That is the whole answer. The team is not passive. The team is responding rationally to what the company rewards.

Three things that create waiting

• No named owner. When a task belongs to a team rather than a person, everybody assumes somebody else has it, and the safe move is to ask you.
• No written standard. If nobody has written down what a good version of this work looks like, the only way to know is to ask the person who holds the standard in their head. That person is you.
• No defined limit. People will decide freely inside a boundary and freeze without one. Nobody has told them what size of decision they can make alone.

Notice that none of these are about motivation. They are about information. Each one is fixable in an afternoon, and the fix is unglamorous.

The limit is the quickest win

Pick any recurring decision and attach a number to it. Refunds under five hundred riyals: just do it. Supplier switches under a thousand: just do it, and log it. Hiring: always comes to me.

The moment the boundary is written down, two things happen. Decisions under the line stop reaching you. And decisions over the line arrive with better information, because people have learned where the line is and why.

Then write the standard

Once people are allowed to decide, they need to know what good looks like. This is where a written procedure earns its keep — not as bureaucracy, but as a way of taking the standard out of your head and putting it where anyone can see it.

A good procedure is short, written in plain words, and carries one worked example of the thing already done properly. If it needs a training session to be understood, rewrite it.

Expect it to feel worse first

For a few weeks, things will be decided slightly worse than you would have decided them. That is not a sign the approach is failing. That is the price, paid once, for a company that no longer stops when you are in a meeting.

Pay it deliberately and it costs you a quarter. Avoid it and it costs you every quarter, forever.