How do you make the business less dependent on you?

For a week, record the decisions brought to you. Capture what the employee is trying to assess, not just who asked. A discount question may really concern the importance of a customer. A scheduling question may mean nobody knows which commitment takes priority.

Select a few recurring decisions that matter to the business. Not every exceptional problem needs to be delegated. Look for situations where a colleague could act independently with the right support.

Separate three possible causes. Each calls for a different response:

What reaches you?	What to investigate first
An employee needs information you can find quickly	Where is it, and why can the employee not access it?
An employee knows the answer but still asks permission	Is authority unclear, or do independent decisions get reversed afterwards?
Two departments cannot reach agreement	Who can balance, for example, a sales commitment against production capacity?

Better access may solve the first situation. The second requires you to stand behind the agreed authority. The third needs a way to resolve competing priorities, not another dashboard.

You may know from experience that a particular customer needs flexibility, a product change carries technical risk or a team can handle a difficult job. That knowledge is not necessarily accessible to another person.

Review a recent example with the colleague who asked. What information did you use? Which consideration decided the outcome? Where is the actual boundary? What would the employee need to decide next time?

This is a conversation about expertise, not an attempt to replace all judgement with instructions. Some decisions properly remain with you or a specialist. Others need a workable distribution of responsibility.

Someone can be responsible for a customer and still need approval for every variation. The task has moved, but the decision has not.

Compare responsibility, authority and information. Add the support available when an exception needs discussion. Our article on employee decision-making provides a practical framework.

Also agree how you will learn from a decision that produces an unexpected outcome. If every setback results in authority being withdrawn, independence quickly becomes theoretical.

Information may already exist but be difficult to find. An employee may understand the situation but lack the ability to record the agreement. Or the schedule and customer record may disagree.

Those are different problems. Appropriate access, a clearer view or an integration may be enough. A new company-wide software package is not automatically the answer.

Test the result with the employee: can they understand the situation, make a permitted decision and put it into effect?

Repeated bottlenecks around the same responsibility may point to a different division of work. A branch could handle its own customer orders within agreed stock and pricing limits, while production specialists assess unfamiliar technical requirements. The aim is to put decisions with the people equipped to make them.

Design that around the customer commitment and available expertise. An organisation chart shows reporting lines; it does not describe how a customer receives good service.

A few weeks after the change, revisit the same kinds of decision. Is the agreed person making them? Can the team deliver the commitments? Do important exceptions reach the right colleague in time? Fewer questions are not progress if people have simply stopped raising problems.

In our review of an incident coordination platform, we examined the connection between roles, processes and the existing application. The commission was for advice, not a new build. The same distinction matters here: understand why decisions stall before choosing a solution. Business process analysis describes how we investigate that with your team.