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Why does every decision still come back to me?

Because responsibility was handed over and authority was not, or the standard was never written down, or both. A person given no standard cannot meet one, and what happens next is predictable: they become tentative, they wait to be told, they stop initiating, because initiating without a standard is how you get caught doing the wrong thing. Then the owner looks at that behaviour and calls it a bad hire. The behaviour is the evidence, and it was manufactured.

The vacuum gets filled

When nothing formal tells a person where they stand, something informal always fills the gap. It is faster than you and far less accurate. In the absence of a written standard, people work to the last thing you said in the corridor, or to what they think you meant, or to whatever the loudest colleague believes. Every one of those ends in a question back to you, and every question back to you is a decision you are still making.

The seat page

The fix that holds is one page per seat, and it has three parts. What this seat owns. What it is allowed to decide without asking. The three numbers it will be judged on. Most owners have never written that page for anyone, including themselves, and the test of whether a decision should have come back to you is whether it is on the page. If it is and they asked anyway, that is a conversation about confidence. If it is not on the page, it was your decision all along, and the fault is the page.

The founder of Summit learned this the expensive way, from a manager he hired into a job that did not exist until the interview and never got written down afterwards. She was loyal and worked as hard as anyone he ever employed, and she still failed, because a person cannot be answerable to a number nobody named.

Engage them, then develop them

A page on its own is a document, and a document is suspect until a habit consumes it. The habit is a short, fixed meeting where the person reports against their three numbers, whether it is going well or not, and where you answer them with evidence rather than impression. A decision made early on impression and executed later on nothing gathered in between is what everybody watching learns to expect from you. Evidence, or it is a verdict with no trial.

Try this

For one week, write down every decision that came to you that somebody else could have made. Beside each, write whether that person has a page saying they could. You will find that most of them do not. Write the pages, starting with the person who interrupts you most.

Is Team the gear in the way?

The Ascent Scan measures how people are picked, told, met and answered against the other three gears, and names the one to fix first. Free, six minutes.

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