When every decision comes back to you,
You hire capable people.
You trust their judgment.
You give them responsibilities.
So why does almost every decision still seem to come back to you?
A question arrives that someone else could probably answer.
A routine approval interrupts work that requires your full attention.
And just as you begin concentrating on something important,
Another message appears.
Can you take a quick look at this?
Individually,
These requests may seem harmless,
But together they can turn a leadership role into a continuous approval process,
Or at least they could feel that way.
And here's the uncomfortable possibility.
The problem may not be that your team lacks initiative.
It may be that nobody is entirely sure where their authority begins and ends.
Think about the difference between assigning someone responsibility and giving them permission to make decisions.
You can tell a colleague they're responsible for a project,
But If every meaningful choice still requires your approval,
You've transferred the work without transferring much of the decision-making authority.
Now,
That colleague has two jobs.
Complete the work,
And repeatedly obtain permission to continue.
Meanwhile,
You have your own responsibilities,
Plus a growing collection of decisions waiting for your attention.
This creates a bottleneck that can be difficult to recognize because Everyone involved may be behaving reasonably.
Your colleague doesn't want to overstep.
You don't want to lose visibility.
And neither of you wants to be responsible for a preventable mistake.
So the safest immediate option is often to ask you again and again.
But what feels safe in an individual moment can become expensive when repeated across an entire working week.
Consider a business director who approves routine client communications.
The team understands the client's needs.
They've handled similar situations before.
Because the limits of their authority were never clearly established.
Even familiar decisions return to the director.
Each approval takes only a few minutes.
Yet every interruption requires the director to stop,
Examine the context,
Decide,
Respond,
And return to whatever they were doing before.
The approval itself may be brief.
The disruption to focus work.
May not be.
Now,
Some decisions absolutely should come to you.
High risk situations,
Unusual financial commitments,
Safety concerns,
Or choices with significant consequences deserve appropriate oversight.
You already know this.
The goal isn't to delegate every decision.
You know that too.
It's to distinguish decisions that genuinely require your judgment from those that return to you simply because nobody knows whether they can proceed or not,
Not clearly.
Here's a practical experiment.
Choose one recurring low-risk approval that comes back to you several times a week,
Not a major strategic decision,
Not something involving patient safety,
Legal exposure,
Or an irreversible commitment of some kind.
Something familiar,
Bounded,
And appropriate to delegate.
Then have a short conversation with the person responsible and clarify three things.
First,
Which decisions can they make independently?
Be specific enough that both of you recognize the boundary.
Second,
What circumstances require escalation?
A defined risk,
An unusual exception.
A spending limit or missing information?
And third,
What information should accompany an escalation?
That way,
When your judgment really is needed,
You can make the decision without reconstructing the entire situation.
Now,
Test the arrangement for five working days.
Before the change,
Count how many times that particular approval comes back to you.
Afterward,
Count again after the five days.
And also notice whether the quality of the decisions remains acceptable and whether additional oversight is required.
You may discover that several interruptions disappear.
That's good.
Or you may discover that the person needs better information,
Better training,
Clearer organizational authority before taking on the decision.
Either result tells you something useful.
Let's put a hypothetical number around this issue just to illustrate.
Suppose four routine approvals reach each day.
Each requires five minutes of active attention.
Across 20 working days,
That's about six hours and 40 minutes of approval time.
Work.
If half of those approvals could appropriately be handled elsewhere,
The gross approval time involved would be about.
Three hours and 20 minutes.
That is not a promise of recovered time.
Delegation requires setup and communication and sometimes review.
And the work doesn't vanish,
Does it?
It may move to someone else,
But it gives you a way to examine whether your attention is being used where it contributes the most value.
And there's a deeper leadership question here.
When people repeatedly return decisions to you,
Are they seeking your expertise?
Or are they seeking protection from making a decision without explicit permission?
Those are very different problems.
One may require your judgment.
The other may require clearer boundaries,
Better information,
And maybe a little bit more trust.
The objective is not to become less accountable here.
It's to make accountability work without requiring your personal involvement in every routine choice.
Leadership capacity isn't measured by how many decisions you can personally absorb.
It's also reflected in how effectively good decisions can happen without you.
So here's the question to carry into your next working week.
How much of your attention is being consumed by decisions that never needed to reach you?
And what could receive the attention instead?
If you're beginning to notice that consistent approvals and interruptions competing demands are leaving less room for your important thinking,
It may help to understand the broader pressure on your attention before deciding what to change.
I'm Paul David.
Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next Insight Brief.
It's a great day to be alive.
