You Can't Coach a Team Into Independence
I’ve seen the same team that once shipped something truly unbelievable in a three-day hackathon spend months circling a decision they could have made in weeks. Everyone was afraid of their own judgment. Nobody was willing to commit to a direction the founder hadn’t blessed in advance.
The autonomy of a team has nothing to do with how talented your people are, or with how tyrannical or gentle your leadership. Dependency is built. It's what happens when CEOs let their vision live in their head, and don’t stop to make it concrete.
People aim at whatever tells them most clearly what "good" looks like. When your vision lives in your head, your opinion is the only signal to follow. So the team orients around your reactions. They study your face in reviews. They decide things based on what they’ve seen you green-light before.
I once asked a co-founder what he thought of a new hire. Instead of giving me his opinion, he told me what the CEO might think. When I pointed it out he said the whole team did it. An entire group of smart, driven, high-agency people had turned into a what-would-the-CEO-want machine. They put aside their own judgment in order to guess at his.
That's how you lose the company you set out to run.
The first thing to go is speed. That’s what I saw with the hackathon team. Their guesses at the CEO’s opinions weren’t solid enough to create the debate that leads to decisions. That meant decisions got circled endlessly, or until they made their way back to the CEO's desk.
That's the second thing you lose, time. When your team doesn’t trust their own judgment they can’t work independently. You end up getting pulled into every decision and problem. That CEO said he probably spent less than 5% of his time on the parts of the job he loves.
As you lose your energy, the team loses morale. Wrestling a hard problem with your own judgment, debating it with people you respect, driving toward something you actually want, that’s energizing. Copying someone else’s instincts and conceding to calls you don’t believe in is not. After enough of that people stop caring, and eventually they start leaving.
The standard advice here is to start inviting disagreement and push back, so people get used to thinking on their own. So leaders publicly celebrate people who bring up hard truths and explicitly tell the team they don’t have to take their advice, that they want to hear from them. None of it works.
You can’t coach a team into independence. The more you step up, the more they step back. Whether you’re squashing their ideas or asking for them, the problem is your centrality.
Creating independence means taking the vague vision in your head and making it concrete. When people have a clear goal and clear boundaries, they can stop guessing and start aiming. That's why the gridlocked team could suddenly move during the hackathon. Rather than orienting around the CEO, they had a clear problem, a concrete target, and a deadline to guide them.
Stepping out of the center starts with the goal. You probably have a vision, but if it's too vague to settle a real argument, the team will turn back to you to make the call. When the destination is clear, people get to fight over the best route. They stop guessing at your opinion and start pulling from their own expertise.
Your goal can be simple, “onboard two clients a week,” but it has to be concrete. The team should be able to use it to debate a real decision and settle it without you. If you resist setting concrete goals, my strategy for making them is here.
Once you have your destination, you set your guardrails. Take three or four high stakes decisions that you are currently involved in and give them to the team. Write down who decides, who has to be consulted, and what would trigger your involvement. When people know where they’re free to use their own judgment, they get used to exercising autonomy.
The map will get tested the first time the team makes a call that you wouldn’t have made. If you “just weigh in” or call a meeting to “get on the same page,” they will correctly read that the map only counts when you agree with the outcome, making it completely useless.
This doesn’t mean you have to swallow every disagreement. You just have to decide when, specifically, you get involved. What is the actual spending threshold, customer-impact level, the size of trade-off where you want to be in the conversation before the call lands. Then stick to that.
Vagueness costs you the same way it costs the team. You may have a vision, but until you've written down where you're going, who decides what, and when you get called in, you have no anchor either. You can't tell whether a call you wouldn't have made is wrong or just different. So you can't leave the team alone. When you make your vision concrete you free your team to move and allow yourself to get back to the work only you can do.
Does your team know what good work looks like without checking your reaction? Reply with your answer. I read every message.
-Christine
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