Look at the person right next to you. Your project manager, your account lead, the one holding the day to day together with quiet, relentless effort. The one whose burnout doesn’t announce itself the way yours does
But now that you see it, what do you actually do about it?
Here’s the honest answer. The fix isn’t a wellness day or a lighter week. Those help for a minute. The real fix is authority. You have to let them actually own something.
And I know why that feels hard, because I’ve been the owner who couldn’t do it.
That’s the thing nobody tells you. When you take back every decision, your right-hand person doesn’t just lose authority. They lose the reason to care. Why bring you an idea if you’re going to rework it anyway? Why push back if the answer is already decided? So they stop. Not in a dramatic way. They just get quiet and start executing orders. And then you wonder why you’re still the bottleneck.
Giving authority isn’t the same as dumping tasks on someone. Tasks you can hand off in an afternoon.
Authority takes three things, and most owners only give the first one.
The first is responsibility. You already do this. You give people work.
The second is the decision. This is where it breaks down. You have to name the actual calls this person now gets to make without you. Which clients they can say no to. What they can approve on their own. Where the line is that they don’t cross. If you can’t say it out loud, they can’t feel it, and they’ll keep checking with you to be safe.
The third is your public backing. When they make a call and it’s reasonable, you support it out loud, even if it’s not the call you would have made. The first time you overrule your PM in front of the team, every ounce of authority you gave them evaporates. They learn the real rule, which is that you’re still deciding, you just made them do the paperwork.
When those three line up, something shifts in your business;
They stop needing you for every decision.
You stop being the ceiling on how fast the work can move.
And the load you’ve been carrying alone finally has somewhere else to go.
That’s the untangling I sit down and do with owners and their right-hand people.
Not a framework you’ll forget by Friday, but an honest conversation about which decisions are still stuck on your desk, and why.
If your best person has gone quiet, that’s worth a look before it gets expensive.
👋 I’m Clint. I help your right-hand person step into confident decision-making, freeing up space for you to focus on your agency.👋 I’m Clint. I help your right-hand person step into confident decision-making, freeing up space for you to focus on your agency.
Work with me!