Why I try to be in fewer decisions, not more

Give most people more scope and they insert themselves into more decisions. I've spent a career learning to do the opposite, and it started somewhere much smaller than where it ended up.

Ten people, two hours of overlap

Early on, I led a ten-plus person analyst team spread across geographies, working on a large enterprise HR platform. The team had a two-hour window a day where everyone was actually online at the same time. Every decision that needed my input and couldn't wait for that window was a decision that waited.

The obvious fix looks like more meetings, squeezed into the two hours that exist. I did the opposite. I wrote down what a requirement looks like when it's actually done, and what evidence has to sit behind it, once, properly, so that standard could travel between people and between time zones without me being in the room to explain it again. Written decisions with visible reasoning were the only thing that scaled. Meetings didn't, because a meeting only reaches the people who are awake for it.

The same rule, ten years and twenty extra people later

I run three concurrent SaaS lines now, with one team, and the maths hasn't changed, it's just gotten less forgiving. Thirty-plus people across three product lines cannot all wait on one person's calendar, and the two-hour-overlap problem from years ago is now a permanent condition, not a scheduling quirk.

So the same rule, scaled: written context over verbal context, a clear standard for what actually needs escalation to me versus what doesn't, and the part that's genuinely harder to accept than it sounds, a real tolerance for a good-enough decision made by someone else over a slightly better one made late.

The trade I'm actually making

Here's the trade, plainly, because it's the one people resist admitting they're making: a single-lane road with a perfect driver moves less traffic in a day than a four-lane highway where someone, somewhere, occasionally misjudges a gap. The four-lane road isn't more careful. It moves more people. Every additional decision I insist on personally reviewing is a lane closed, in exchange for a version of correctness that only I would have noticed was missing.

That's not the same as lowering the bar. The standard I write down has to be good enough that someone else can meet it without me watching, which is a harder document to write than a good meeting is to run. A meeting can lean on my judgment in the room. A standard has to survive without me in it.

What this actually costs me

The part I still notice, even now: escalation has to have a real definition or it quietly turns back into me reviewing everything anyway, just later and with extra steps. I keep that boundary explicit on purpose, the same way I keep an explicit list of the things I've decided not to build. A leader who says "bring me anything" is not being generous. They're becoming the two-hour window all over again, just for a bigger team.

Let me say the part that took me longest to actually believe: the job isn't to make every decision well. It's to make the organisation capable of making most of them without you, and to be honest with yourself about which small percentage still genuinely needs you.

So here's the question worth sitting with. Which decisions in your team still route through you because they truly need to, and which ones route through you because you haven't yet written down what "good enough" looks like without you in the room?