A leader shares the 3-3-3 rule for delegating decisions: spend three minutes researching, talk to three people, and propose three solutions plus a recommendation. If your manager approves, you handle similar calls alone next time. Autonomy works when decisions stay inside the plan.
I don't think you need to take yourself out of all decision-making. What I really look for in a team is, do they have a mechanism? Do they have a process? Do they have a framework for coming to their own conclusions? But if we're here as a team and it's fine to just say, hey, before I make this, what do you think? I just wanted to run it by you first. The basic framework that I give all my people, it's 3-3-3. So it's, did you take 3 minutes to do some basic Google searching and ChatGPTing? Did you talk to 3 other people? And then did you come up with 3 possible solutions and 1 recommendation? And if they bring me that and I find myself saying, yeah, I agree with you, then I say, look, next time you don't have to bring that to me. But if I'm gonna give somebody scope to make a decision, my thing is, are you making a decision within a scope of a plan that's already been established or are you deviating from the plan?
