I’ve been having quite a few conversations with business owners recently who are, quite frankly, knackered!
Wen we get chatting about what’s going on, there isn’t always one big problem causing it. The business might be doing reasonably well, they’ve got a decent team around them and there aren’t any major dramas keeping them awake at night. Yet they’re still finishing most days feeling like they’ve been pulled in twenty different directions and haven’t achieved half of what they intended to.
Sound familiar?
When we dig a little deeper, there’s often a common theme. They’re spending an enormous amount of their time making decisions, answering questions and sorting out things that, realistically, shouldn’t need their involvement.
There’s actually a name for this. It’s called decision fatigue and whilst it might sound like another fashionable psychology term, it’s something I see regularly in the businesses I work with. More importantly, it can have a surprisingly significant impact on productivity, profitability and the ability of a business to grow.
Every decision comes at a cost
Think about how many decisions you make during an average working day.
Before you’ve even finished your first coffee (a decision in itself!), you’ve probably answered a handful of emails, approved something, dealt with a customer query and had somebody pop their head around the door to ask what they should do about something.
Then there’s the manager who wants your opinion on a relatively straightforward staffing issue, somebody asking whether they can order new equipment and another person wanting you to check something before it goes out to a customer.
Individually, none of these things is particularly taxing and most probably take a couple of minutes to resolve. However, when you’re dealing with dozens of them throughout the day, they start to eat into your time and, more importantly, your ability to concentrate on the bigger stuff.
There’s a growing body of research around the impact of mental fatigue on our ability to make decisions, although the relationship isn’t quite as straightforward as suggesting we have a fixed number of decisions available each day. What we do know is that constant interruptions, competing demands and sustained mental effort can make it harder to concentrate, weigh up options and think clearly.
And that’s where the commercial impact starts to creep in.
Because whilst you’re busy deciding whether somebody can spend £150 on something, the £50,000 opportunity sitting on your desk hasn’t had the attention it deserves.
When being helpful becomes bloody exhausting
One of the things I often find when working with founders is that they’ve unintentionally created the very problem they’re complaining about.
And I say that with affection because it’s usually come from a good place!
When you start a business, you’re involved in pretty much everything. You make the decisions, solve the problems, deal with customers and generally keep the wheels turning. As you take on employees, it’s perfectly natural that they’ll come to you for guidance because, after all, you know the business better than anyone.
The difficulty comes when the business grows but that way of working doesn’t change.
You might now have 15, 25 or even 50 employees, including managers who are perfectly capable of making decisions, yet everyone still comes to you because that’s how things have always been done.
And here’s the interesting bit. Every time you answer a question that somebody could reasonably have answered themselves, you’re reinforcing that behaviour.
People quickly learn how a business operates. If they know you’ll make the decision, they’ll bring it to you. If they know you’ll step in when something becomes difficult, there’s less incentive for them to work through the problem themselves.
Before long, you’ve got a business full of people who are technically responsible for things but still rely on you to make the final call.
Meanwhile, you’re wondering why you can’t get five minutes to yourself!
The hidden impact on business performance
This is where I think decision fatigue becomes particularly interesting from a business perspective, because the consequences extend well beyond the founder feeling overwhelmed.
Think about what happens when every decision has to go through one person.
Projects slow down because people are waiting for approval. Managers become less confident because they’re rarely given the opportunity to exercise their own judgement. Employees get frustrated because they can’t get answers quickly enough and the founder ends up firefighting rather than focusing on the things that will actually improve the business.
I’ve seen businesses where perfectly capable managers have become little more than messengers between their teams and the owner. They’ll identify a problem, take it upstairs, wait for an answer and then communicate the decision back down again.
Which begs the question, what exactly are we paying managers to manage?
There’s also a less obvious cost when it comes to developing your people. If managers aren’t making decisions, they’re missing opportunities to build the skills, judgement and confidence they’ll need as the business grows.
And when the founder eventually wants to step back, take a proper holiday or concentrate on something new, they discover that the business struggles to function without them.
That’s a pretty expensive problem to have, particularly if you’re thinking about succession, investment or eventually selling the business.
So, how do you stop being everyone’s answer machine?
The good news is that addressing this doesn’t necessarily mean employing more people, introducing complicated systems or disappearing into your office and refusing to speak to anyone!
In my experience, the starting point is usually getting much clearer about who is responsible for what and, crucially, what authority comes with that responsibility.
It’s something I spend a lot of time working on with clients because you’d be surprised how many businesses have job descriptions that explain what somebody does without making it particularly clear what they’re actually accountable for achieving.
For example, you might have a customer service manager who is responsible for customer satisfaction, but are they authorised to resolve complaints, offer refunds or make decisions about service recovery without asking you first?
Or perhaps you’ve got an operations manager who’s responsible for keeping things running efficiently, but every purchase, staffing decision or change to a process still needs your approval.
If you want people to take ownership, they need to understand what that ownership looks like in practice.
That means agreeing clear outcomes, sensible boundaries and the circumstances in which something genuinely needs escalating.
It also means accepting that other people won’t always make exactly the same decisions you would. Provided they’re operating within agreed boundaries and the outcome is sensible, that’s generally something worth getting comfortable with.
Otherwise, you’ll spend your life employing people to do jobs and then doing half the thinking for them.
Another useful exercise is to pay attention to the questions you’re being asked over the course of a week. You might be surprised by how many fall into one of three categories:
- Decisions that genuinely need your involvement because of their commercial significance or risk.
- Decisions that somebody else could make if they had clearer guidance or authority.
- Questions that keep coming up because a process, responsibility or expectation hasn’t been properly established.
That final category is particularly worth looking at because repeated questions are often a sign that something in the business needs sorting out.
And whilst answering the same question for the tenth time might only take two minutes, fixing the reason it keeps being asked could save you hours over the course of a year.
Your time is probably more expensive than you think
Something I regularly encourage business owners to consider is the value of their own time.
If you’re running a business turning over £1 million, £3 million or £5 million, how much of your working week should realistically be spent approving minor expenditure, answering routine questions or resolving issues that your managers are being paid to handle?
Of course, there will always be occasions when you need to get involved in the detail. That’s part of running a business and I’m certainly not suggesting founders should become completely detached from what’s happening on the ground.
However, there’s a difference between choosing to get involved because something genuinely warrants your attention and being involved because nobody else will make a decision.
And the cost goes beyond the hours you lose.
It’s the opportunities you don’t pursue, the improvements you never quite get around to making and the strategic decisions that get pushed into next week because you’ve spent this week dealing with everybody else’s problems.
A final thought…
If you’re finding yourself increasingly frustrated by the number of decisions landing on your desk, it’s worth looking at how your business is operating before assuming you simply need to work harder or become better at managing your time.
In many of the businesses I work with, improving this comes down to some fairly straightforward changes around management capability, accountability, job roles and expectations. Once people understand what they’re responsible for, what good performance looks like and which decisions they’re trusted to make, things tend to run much more smoothly.
It also makes the business considerably less dependent on the founder, which is important whether you’re planning to grow, maintain what you’ve built or eventually step away.
Ultimately, you’ve employed people because you need their skills, experience and contribution to help the business succeed. Making sure they’re equipped and empowered to use those things is a pretty sensible investment.
And if you’re still making every decision yourself, perhaps it’s time to ask whether you’re getting the full value from the people you’re paying to help you run the business.
If any of this sounds familiar and you’re wondering why everything still seems to land on your desk despite having a team around you, let’s have a chat. I work with business owners to get to the bottom of what’s holding their businesses back, whether that’s unclear responsibilities, managers who need developing or simply a lack of structure and accountability. Sometimes a fresh pair of eyes and a few practical changes can make an enormous difference to how your business operates, freeing up your time to focus on the things that actually make you money!