🚩Tactical Memo 074: The Decisions You Kept Are The Bottleneck

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I used to think delegating meant handing off the work and keeping the calls.

Give the team the build. Keep the decision. That felt like leadership.

It wasn't. It was a trap, and I built it myself.

Everything routed back to me. Every comparison, every plan, every "which way do you want to go on this."

My team got fast at producing and slow at deciding. They learned to assemble and wait.

And I became the most expensive approval queue in the building.

I was the smartest person in every decision because I was the only person in every decision. That is not a compliment. That is a ceiling.

Worse, the people I trusted most were the ones I starved.

The strong ones do not wait well. They start solving around you, or they leave for a place that lets them decide.

Here is what took me too long to see.

The work was never my bottleneck. The decisions were. And I was hoarding every one of them.

So I changed what I hand off.

Stop delegating the task. Delegate the decision, and bound the downside.

Here is how I run it.

1. I name the decision they own, not the task they do. Not "build the vendor comparison." Instead, "you own which vendor we pick."

2. I set the blast radius. The level of consequence they can spend without checking with me. Inside it, they decide and move. Outside it, they bring me the call.

3. I ask for the after, not the before. They tell me what they chose and why, once it's done. I am not a gate they clear. I am a record they update.

4. I refuse to take it back. When they bring a decision inside their radius to me anyway, I hand it straight back. "That's yours. What are you going to do?"

Let me show you the difference in real language.

The weak version is how I used to delegate.

"Pull together the vendor options and walk me through them. I'll make the call."

So they build a clean deck. I pick in four minutes. They learn nothing about choosing, and next quarter they bring me the same deck for the same four minutes.

The strong version sounds like this.

"You own the vendor pick. Standard contract under $25K a year, you decide and send me a line on what you chose and why. Above that, or any non-standard term, bring me your two finalists and your lean."

Same work. Opposite altitude.

Now they are deciding inside a clear boundary. I see the calls that actually carry risk. The rest stop landing on my desk at all.

The clearest version of this I have seen did not happen in an office.

General Stanley McChrystal ran the special operations task force hunting Al Qaeda in Iraq. Every decision had to climb the chain and come back down. He was the bottleneck, and the enemy moved faster than his approvals.

So he stopped approving. He pushed the calls down to the people closest to the fight and had them report what they did after, not ask before. He named it empowered execution.

The decisions did not get slower or worse. They got faster and sharper, because the people making them had the best information and owned the result.

Eyes on the fight. Hands off the calls.

Here is the part that matters more every month.

The assembly is cheap now. Your team can generate that vendor comparison in an afternoon with AI sitting right next to them.

So the deck was never the scarce thing. The judgment behind the pick is.

If all you delegate is the assembly, you have handed off the part the machine already does and kept the part that needs a person. That is backwards.

Hand down the decision. That is the part with your name on it, and it is the only part worth teaching.

Now the hard part. The one most people avoid.

A blast radius only works if you let calls inside it go wrong.

Some will. Someone will pick the vendor you wouldn't have. The contract will carry a term you'd have fought. You will want to step in.

Don't. If you only let people decide things that can't go wrong, you haven't delegated a decision. You've delegated a formality, and they know it.

The cost of a bad call inside the radius is the tuition. You are paying to build someone who decides without you.

Watch for the tell. The first time someone runs a call inside their radius and lands it without you, they stand taller in the next review.

That is the whole point. You traded one decision you could have made for a person who will now make a hundred.

So before your next handoff, run it.

Name the decision, not the task. Set the radius. Ask for the after. Hand it back when they test you.

Hand off the work and you stay the bottleneck you built. Hand off the decision and you build an operator who outgrows the need to ask.

Until next time,

Justin Bateh, PhD
Founder and Editor
Tactical Memo