5 Ways to Build a Team That Can Say Yes Without You

- Hey, it's great to have you back for another episode of the Craig Rochelle Leadership Podcast. I'm gonna value your time. We're gonna get right into it. I got a question for you. What if I told you that your best people are often waiting on you? Not because they lack talent, not because they lack initiative, but because somewhere along the way without even knowing it, you've trained them to wait. The truth is right now, somewhere in your organization, there's probably somebody who knows what to do, but they're waiting on permission from you. And this wait, if they are waiting, it's costing you way more than you actually probably realized. Now, the last episode, we called this problem the permission bottleneck. I'll give you the definition again, that we're gonna look at new content. What is a permission on bottleneck? It exists whenever people who could move the mission forward are waiting for someone else's permission to do it. And we all have these bottlenecks. The problem is the longer they wait, the more that the mission tends to slow down. Now, there's the one question that changes everything. We asked it last month, let's ask it again. The question is this.

How deep into your organization are people empowered to say yes without having to ask permission first? How deep into the organization can someone say, that's a great idea, let's do it. Instead of needing approval from someone higher in the organization. And the key thought is this, where yes lives determines how fast your mission moves forward. So what we're gonna do today is we're gonna look at five practical ways that you can push yes deeper into your organization. And we're not just gonna identify the bottleneck, but we're gonna try to remove it so your best people can stop waiting and start leading. So the first thing we need to do is find it. Before we can fix the bottleneck, you have to discover where it is. And the challenge is, is this rarely obvious because oftentimes it kind of hides buried in systems or inhabits or in approvals that no one questions anymore. It's just kind of always been that way. So how do you find where the bottlenecks are? I'm gonna give you two questions. First question is this, what team or department are we waiting most often on? What team or department, maybe even person are we waiting on over and over again? Second question is, where do good ideas slow down? You have a good idea, you try to implement it

and somewhere in your organization those ideas tend to slow. I want you to think about it. Maybe even talk about it with your team and identify where momentum slows most often. So if you wanna break the bottleneck, don't just think about breaking it. Don't just think about tweaks. I want you to think about like a breakthrough. In other words, we're not just gonna tweak something by 2% or 5%, which you might do is say, "Hey, we wanna do twice as much in half the time." That's a breakthrough. And if you're gonna try to do twice as much in half the time, wherever this breaks down first, that's probably your bottleneck. Whenever you start to see or think this could be a bottleneck, don't make excuses for it, don't explain it away, acknowledge it, follow it so you can fix it even if you're the bottleneck. And the reality is this, like you don't need a crisis or some big problem to find the bottleneck. If you just start increasing the pressure, the bottleneck tends to reveal itself. I'll give you an example where I was the bottleneck. Our church, on the weekend, it starts long before church starts. In other words, my portion, what I do, starts about two and a half to three hours before the service starts.

About 10 years in to leading the church, I was still obsessed about overseeing the chair formation. In other words, they would move the chairs during the week and I wanted them to be just right. And the reason is because I care a lot and because I'm pretty good at it. And I know how to have the right spacing so it feels warm, too close, and it doesn't feel right too far away, it feels wrong. If the chairs aren't rounded, it feels colder. If the distance is too much, people don't know how to relate to each other. And so the whole team would wait on me to come out and say move that one here and move this one there. We're literally 10 years in and I'm overseeing the way we set up chairs. They're waiting on me and I'm the bottleneck. No one called that the bottleneck because I was the boss, but I was a bottleneck. If you look around in your organization, you're gonna see that sometimes there's too many people who need approval or you might be involved in things that really don't need you. isn't always where the stakes are the highest. In other words, like chairs aren't gonna change the world. But it's just wherever people have to wait the longest. And every week they had to wait on me, we had to identify on the bottleneck, and so we need to fix me.

So let's talk about five ways to drive yes deeper. The first thing you wanna do is this, number one, clarify the guard rails. Here's why, clarify the guard rails. Most leaders think that people need more authority. A lot of times they just need clarity. They just need to know what specifically are we trying to accomplish. Because most people aren't asking for permission because they lack confidence. They're asking because they're not sure what's expected. They are sure what matters most. They are sure what the win is, or they aren't really sure where the boundaries are. And we as leaders, we often ask this. We ask, why won't they take initiative? A better question is this, not why won't they take initiative? A better question is, have I made the boundaries clear enough for them to act? If they know what we expect, when we expect it, then they'll often say, okay, I can go and develop this. Think about driving a car. If you've got guard rails on the side of the highway, they don't slow you down. What happens? Guard rails actually let you drive faster because you know where the edges are, and you feel safe within the guard rails. The principle is true in leadership, empowerment.

Isn't the absence of boundaries? It's clarity inside them. Let me say it again, when you're empowering people, it doesn't mean you just give them free reign. It's actually clarity of boundaries, and so they can go, I can run hard and fast within these boundaries. So as a leader, you might ask these three questions. Ask your team, ask yourself, ask around. What can you decide on your own? Ask your team members that. What can you decide on your own? Ask your team members what requires consultation? Listen for their answers. If they say, well, I need approval on this, you know, whatever, at least a third question. What requires approval? Ask what can you decide on your own? What requires consultation? And what requires approval? Now, if they can't answer these questions, they're probably confused. Why? Because you haven't given them clarity. Chances are they may say, well, if I just knew this, I could do that. And when good people are confused, they tend to wait. When good people have clarity, they tend to act. And when they act, guess what?

They feel valued, and they get better, and the mission moves forward. So first thing we're gonna do as leaders, we're gonna clarify the guardrails. Then the second thing we're gonna do is we're gonna build around values, not rules. There's a big difference. Build around values, not just rules. Now, why do values matter so much? Because rules create compliance, but values create ownership. If I give you a rule, like, okay, I'm gonna follow the rule. If I say here's the values, you say, okay, I wanna live within those values. It's rules create compliance and values create ownership. A rule says you do this and this situation. A value says, here's what matters. You decide what to do in this situation. Big difference. Rules tell people what to do, values teach people how to think. We want to create ownership, not just those who do what they're told. So, some teams, the reality is, they don't have a permission problem. In some cases, they actually have a values problem. They keep asking because nobody ever told them how to think. All we've ever done is tell them what to do. We don't just want people doing what they've been told. We want them thinking like leaders and thinking like owners. How do we do that? Not just rules, we give them values.

And what happens is when people understand, okay, well, this matters and this is why it matters. And this is how we make decisions here. Then they don't need permission as often because they have the principles that empower them to make organizational honoring decisions. And the truth is this, the stronger your values, the fewer approvals you need. And the clearer your culture, the faster your mission moves. If everyone knows we value this, this is important here. We don't do that. We do this. Then all of a sudden people say, I can know that I can get this done. I don't need to go get approval because I know this matters here. So, let's just take it slow. Clarify the guard rails that gives you permission to move faster. Build around values, not rules. The third thing is, and this is gonna be something you have to grow into is trust before certainty. Trust before you are sure. What does that mean? Well, most of us as leaders, we want certainty. We wait for certainty. We want more data, giving more information, giving more confidence. I wanna move with a perfect moment.

And so we tell ourselves we need more time. And what we're really waiting on is we're waiting for confidence. But I want you to think about this, confidence rarely comes before you make a decision, confidence tends to come after you make the decision and realize, wow, that was a good decision. And so you actually have to trust and move before you're certain. So trust your team before you're sure they're going to nail it. Trust the training that you've received to make a good decision. Trust your instinct. Sometimes there's just something inside you can say, I'm not sure why, but I feel like this is the right thing. Trust your instinct. Trust that a good decision made now is actually better than a perfect decision made too late. Let me say that again. It doesn't have to be the perfect decision, but just trust that, hey, if we keep it moving, when we make a pretty good decision now, it's better than waiting a month for a perfect decision because a month is usually too long. Why? Most of the time, the mission doesn't suffer because we move too fast. Most of the time, it suffers because we waited too long. Sure. Every now and then you get a leader that's always going off just too fast, whatever. But the majority of the line time is we overanalyze, we wait, we want more information, and we're too slow rather than too fast. The fourth thing we're going to do is this. Really, really important. You want your mission to keep moving forward, you want people to be able to say yes, deeper in the organization than reward ownership. When they make a decision, they get it right, celebrate it like crazy because in leadership, you get what you reward. If you want more ownership, reward ownership when you see it. If you celebrate every time people check in with you, like, hey, thank you for checking with me, that was really good. Then people are going to do what? They're going to keep checking in with you. If you celebrate when others decide without you, what are they going to do? They're going to start deciding without you. Here's the culture that most leaders unintentionally create. A team member sees a problem. There's a problem over there. That team member waits for someone to tell them what to do about the problem. Here's the culture that you want. You want a team member who sees a problem and they solve it. They don't have to wait. They don't have to ask permission. They know, oh, hear the guardrails. You hear the values. This fits within our values. There's not a rule. Someone trusts me to make a decision. I'd make a decision. They see it and they fix it on their own. That change doesn't happen by accident. You have to be intentional about it. It happens when leaders intentionally reward initiative over approval. Even if they take initiative and the

idea is not perfect, you say, hey, you know what? At least you got out there and mix something up. In other words, I would rather reward an attempt that isn't 100% successful than passivity that waits around and doesn't move at all. We're going to celebrate whenever someone does something without asking for permission. You did it. Great job. That's amazing. Every culture is training people to do something. You're training them to act or training them to wait. You're training them to think or they've got a default of waiting for someone else to think. Ask yourself, are you training your people to ask for permission or are you training your people to decide on their own? The reality is you're training them whether you realize it or not. Every time they come to you and ask you a question, if you answer it, you're training them to keep asking you. You make it more likely they're going to ask again. Every unnecessary answer teaches someone not to think. Let me say it again. Every unnecessary answer. They ask you a question. Well, let me tell you what their smart leaders do. You're training them not to think and to keep coming to you. So how do you push decisions deeper, like practically? Well, Andy Stanley, who teaches a lot on leadership, he says to the most important words in leadership would be the words you decide. Someone comes into your office and says, hey, leader, I respect you. You're so wise, so smart. What do you think we should do about this? And you know probably what the right thing to do is, but because you're a great leader, you look at that person and say, you know what? You decide and you let them decide. Now, when you tell them you decide, that might make you feel a little bit uncomfortable and they might even feel a little bit uncomfortable because they're used to asking you and then you answering. But every time you say it back, hey, you decide. Well, what do you think? You decide. Every time you do that, something shifts. And what happens is they start to think, oh, well, my leader values me. My leader trusts me. My leader trusts my judgment. My judgment must be pretty good. And then every time they start to get a little more confident, a little bit better, and you're shifting it from them needing you to you empowering them. And that's when things really start to get special. You decide. It doesn't just push decisions deeper, but it pushes belief with it. So people in your organization say,

"Well, I'm capable, they believe in me here." I don't just have the ability to say, "No, no, we don't do that here." I actually have the ability to say, "Yes, this is what we do." And that's when things start to go, they get excited. Your team starts to decide, and they start to grow. And then they buy into the mission more. Their ownership increases, and suddenly the mission moves forward. But the opposite is true as well. If every decision gets escalated, I have to ask my boss, I have to ask my supervisor, we need to get approval. If every decision gets escalated, ownership gets eliminated. They stop owning it, and they start relegating to someone else and saying, "Well, this isn't my thing to do." So we're gonna trust before certainty. And the fifth thing we're gonna do is this. We're gonna release before you're ready, release before you're ready. And this is not easy at all, because most leaders know what they should release, but we just don't wanna do it. We like being important, we like being needed, and we're not sure they're gonna do a good job as us. And so if you have that fear,

I wanna tell you, it is normal. The fear of letting go and delegating all that is normal. We all feel that. In fact, when you think about it, is the controlling leader, the one that you don't want, and the empowering leader, those two leaders, they often have a very similar heart. Both leaders, the controlling and the empowered one, they have in common, they care, and they care a lot. They care deeply about the mission. The difference is what they do with that care. The best leaders, the empowering leaders, they care enough to empower other people to make decisions, to get ownership, and to move the mission forward. Now, will they make some mistakes? Absolutely, they're gonna make some mistakes. And guess what happens when they make mistakes? They actually learn, they grow, and they get better. And that is the price of ownership. And the principle to live by is this. Are they gonna make mistakes? Yes. But the cost of a few mistakes is almost always smaller than the cost of teaching everyone to wait. Say it again, that the cost of someone, it's not quite 100%. The cost of a few of those mistakes when a leader is actually growing and getting better

and learning is almost always smaller than the cost of everyone sitting back, waiting on someone else to get something done. So I would encourage you to start small. Find one decision this week, one project that someone else could be doing or making, and then hand it off and see what happens, and then do it again, do it again. And when they do a great job and they take initiative, celebrate it, celebrate it, celebrate it, celebrate it. And over time, the leaders around you, they're gonna grow and get better and they're developing wisdom and getting experience and they're growing in ownership. And eventually, guess what? Wow. They become better than you. You release to them. It used to be something you do, but they're great at it. And they get better than you. And the things that you released get done effectively without you. And they feel valued, the mission moves forward and it's amazing what we can do together. So the goal is not just to find people you can trust with decisions, but it's to develop leaders until they get good enough, they make better decisions without you. So push yes deeper, because anyone can say no.

The question is, who has permission to say yes? And when you empower other people to do what you used to do, you're not working yourself out of a job. You're actually multiplying yourself into the mission. They have your values, you're hard, and they do more without you. Now, I'll get personal with you. I value you, and I'm gonna work hard to bring you both organizational content and personal leadership development, and I'm gonna do my best to help you, because I really believe you have more in you. And I'm gonna ask you to please help me back, really, really simply, we're not slowing this down with any paid ads, it's just straight content. And what you can do to help me is you can subscribe to the content, you can like it, you can write a comment, you can share on social media. If you do these small things, it's just gonna help us reach more people, and I'm gonna work really, really hard. I'm doing this out of the sincerity of my heart to bless you, to help you. If you do that, it would mean a lot to me. And let me speak to you directly, and tell you, there is more in you. Sometimes people ask you, Craig, when you started teaching on leadership and started the church years ago, did you ever see all this happening?

It's just no way, never, never, never, never, never, never, never. Not even close. In the early years, I was the bottleneck, and I was not good at trusting others. But what I found is that when you share ministry, there is a bond that takes place when someone else gets better. And suddenly they're better than you. And then together, you're not just doing twice as much, one plus one, you do like five times as much because it's a multiplied impact. And then you bring more people in and more people in. And then you're not just empowering leaders, but you've got empowered leaders, empowering more leaders. And your values get pushed deeper into the organization and the mission flows. And then one day, whatever it is you care about, there's just more of it. There's more business impact, there's more profit to use for good things. There's more lives being changed. There's just more because there's actually less of you and more of great people around you. So my encouragement to you is this. Believe there's more in you, more through you, more possible when you bring more great leaders around you and power them. And together you can do something really, really special. Guess why? Good news today. You got a little bit better.

Can you feel it? A little bit better. This is great news because everyone wins when the leader gets better. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)