“When I’m not there, everything grinds to a halt.”

“I’ll do it myself — it’s quicker.”

Be honest: how often do you say that? I know, a lot. And I promise you’re not alone.

Many business owners and managers say it almost with pride. And I understand why: it means knowing the company, being quick and having a bigger-picture perspective that others don’t yet have.

But there’s a problem you often don’t notice straight away. You notice it when everything depends on you. If everything goes through you, you implode and the company doesn’t grow. It doesn’t grow because it can’t: under these conditions, growth is impossible!

Because if someone has to ask you whether they can offer a discount, how to handle a client, which task takes priority, whether they can spend 500 euros or how to solve an operational problem, you don’t just have a team that lacks autonomy. You’ve built a company where the right answer is always, and only, yours.

So something fairly predictable happens, although you hadn’t considered it at the start: nobody makes decisions.

Because they’ve learned that making decisions without you is dangerous, and they’ve stopped doing it.

Perhaps they even took the initiative once, but it was a disaster. They made a mistake and you corrected them. Another time, they misunderstood a priority. And another time you said: “Leave it, I’ll do it myself”.

The end result? The more you step in because others aren’t autonomous, the more you teach them that it’s better to wait for you than to act independently. It’s a vicious circle that is utterly devastating for you, for them and for the company.

Now, I’m not saying you should suddenly announce “From today, you decide”. The work is much more concrete and practical: you need to pass on decision-making criteria, not just tasks.

Here are some examples of what enables someone else to start thinking in a way that is compatible with yours:

• Which decisions can a manager make without asking?
• When should they involve the business owner instead?
• When does it make sense to make an exception for a client?
• How much room for error are you willing to allow to free up your time and increase the company’s autonomy?

Again: they don’t have to become you. But it’s essential that you share, without jealously guarding your knowledge and experience, how you see the company, so that they too can make good decisions even when you’re not in the room.

Narrowing the gap between the vision of those leading the business and what actually happens in its people, decisions and processes is one of the topics I’m most passionate about in my work with business owners, managers and companies, because it’s what delivers the biggest results. Because growth means building a company that doesn’t need to wait for you to keep moving.