Coach Sid

The Blind Spot

Issue #1  ·  6 min read

This week's Blind Spot

Every correct decision you make yourself is training your team to stop thinking.

Last month, a founder I am coaching sat across from me and said something I have heard dozens of times.

“My team cannot make a single decision without me.”

Eighteen people. $4M in revenue. Every operational call still ran through him. He said it like it was a team problem.

I asked him to walk me through a normal week. How decisions were made? Who made them? What happened when something was unclear?

His team brought him questions they already knew the answer to. He sat in meetings just to “stay in the loop.” He responded to Slack within four minutes. And the reasoning behind most company decisions lived in his head. Never written down.

None of this looked like a problem. It looked like a founder who was fast, present, and deeply involved. But over three years, every one of those behaviours had trained his team to do one thing: stop thinking for themselves.

I asked him: “How many decisions crossed your desk last week that did not genuinely require you?”

He went quiet. Then he said: “Most of them.”

Here are five ways you might be running the same pattern right now.

The loop you built without realising it.

The Blind Spot · Coach Sid

1. You answer questions your team already knows the answer to.

Someone walks in: “Should we go with vendor A or vendor B?” You give your opinion. Thirty seconds, done. But they already knew the answer. They just did not feel safe committing to it.

Do this fifty times a month and your team starts treating you like a search engine. They stop building judgment because yours is always available. And when you always give the answer, people stop figuring things out. That is what happens.

2. You attend meetings “to stay in the loop.”

Staying in the loop is how you become the loop. Your presence changes the room. People perform instead of deciding. And the moment you miss a meeting? The room just waits.

3. You are available for everything.

This is the one most founders miss. You respond to Slack in four minutes and think that makes you a good leader.

Your team learns that the fastest way to solve a problem is to bring it to you. So they stop trying to solve it themselves. They are not lazy. They are being rational. Why sit with something for an hour when you will answer in four minutes?

And your best people, the ones who want real ownership, they notice. They start to check out.

4. You hold all the context in your head.

Look, your team wants to own more. But if nobody knows why you made a decision, they have to come back to you every time something related comes up. That is you becoming the bottleneck without realising it.

5. You reward speed over ownership.

When someone checks with you first, you feel good about it. When someone takes longer because they thought it through alone, you get impatient. Your team notices what gets rewarded.

The founder I sat with did this for three years. He valued responsiveness. His team learned that responsive meant “ask the founder first.” His best senior hire left in less than a year. The ones who stayed learned to wait.

“

They are not lazy. They are being rational.

Coach Sid

The Blind Spot

These patterns show up in 8 out of 10 founders I work with between $1M and $10M. They all come back to the same thing: the system has nowhere to route decisions except through you.

The founder I mentioned at the top picked one decision that week. Just one. He gave it to the person who should have owned it. The decision was a B-minus. He let it stay as is. And that was the beginning of reversing the pattern.

Your turn. Pick one decision you should not be making. Assign a person. Make the criteria clear. Try it for one week. See what shifts.

Coach Sid

Which one of these five made you most uncomfortable? That is probably the one costing you the most right now.

Go deeper on this one

Every decision you hold costs you in three places: your time, your money, and your energy. The 3 Currencies of Freedom shows you exactly where those currencies are leaking, why the tactics you have tried so far have not fixed it, and what to do about it this week.

P.S. If this landed in your Promotions tab, move it to Primary so next Tuesday's issue shows up where you will actually see it. And if a founder comes to mind who should be reading this, forward it to them.