Bradley HamnerFounder, BlueprintOS · Founder - Above the Business & BlueprintOS

How to empower your team

Name: How to empower your team
Uploaded: 2025-10-27T05:00:34+00:00
Duration: 49 s
Channel: Bradley Hamner
Description: In this excerpt from the leadership talk "How to empower your team," the speaker outlines a concise framework for managers when a team member seeks help…

27 Oct 2025 · 1 min

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In this excerpt from the leadership talk "How to empower your team," the speaker outlines a concise framework for managers when a team member seeks help. The first step is to ask the employee what resources, research, or outreach they have already attempted—such as phone calls, consulting teammates, reviewing past notes, or conducting independent research. By confirming prior effort, managers avoid becoming the organization’s bottleneck, a situation the speaker likens to the "law of the lid" or "rainmaker" effect, where all queries funnel through a single point. The advice emphasizes fostering employee initiative and preserving managerial bandwidth.

Chapters

So how do we handle it when a team member comes to us to ask a question? Number one is we want to see what resources and what have they done to try to solve this problem first. What have they thought through? Who, who have they picked up the phone and called? Who else on the team have they reached out to? Did they do any research? Did they utilize, ah, to try to help them with this problem? Did they go back to past notes? Did they do anything And if they haven't done that, if they haven't reached out to any resources and the first person that they've thought to come to is you, well, now you're the bottleneck of your organization. It's the law of the lid. It's the rainmaker, whatever you want to call it. Everything is going to start running through you. So number one, the first step in this is to see and to ask them, well, what have you tried to do to solve this up to this point?