You keep answering before your team has finished thinking

Someone on your team brings you a problem. You have seen this one before, you know the answer, and you give it in under a minute. They thank you and leave. That is what being useful feels like, and you probably had four of those conversations today.

Now think about the meeting you ran this morning. A question came up and the room went quiet. Nobody was working on it. They were waiting, because they have learned that you will have it before they do. How long did you let that silence run before you filled it?

Your speed is the lesson they learned

Nobody on your team decided to stop thinking. They learned it from a hundred small moments where thinking turned out to be pointless. They worked up a view, brought it to you, and you replaced it with a better one in the time it took them to explain it. After a while it is simply quicker to skip the first step and come to you empty.

So the queue outside your door grows, and you call it being busy. Every decision above a certain size routes through you, and plenty below it. You are the slowest part of your own team, and it does not feel that way because you answer so fast. What would happen to the work if you were out for three weeks?

Being right is what makes this hard to stop

If your answers were poor, this would fix itself. People would stop asking. The trouble is that your answers are good, and often better than what they would have reached on their own. Holding one back feels like making the work worse on purpose.

Sometimes it is. A decision made by someone still learning will be a little slower and a little rougher than yours. That is the price, and you need to be clear with yourself that you are paying it deliberately. The alternative is a team where one person gets better at the job every year and everyone else stays where they are. Which of your people has made a real call in the last month that you did not touch?

Ask what they would do before you say what you would

The practical move is small and uncomfortable. When someone brings you a problem, ask what they would do with it. Then stop talking.

The first few times, they will say they do not know, and that this is why they came to you. Ask for their best guess anyway. Tell them a guess is fine and you will not hold them to it. You will get something tentative, and part of it will be wrong. Resist the urge to correct the wrong part first. Find the part that works, say so, and ask what they would need to be sure of before going ahead.

Some conversations will end with their answer and not yours. That is the point. Others will end with yours, because the gap was real. You still gain, because now you know where the gap is, and so do they. When did you last let someone's answer stand when yours was better?

Decide which answers are actually yours to give

None of this means going quiet on everything. Some decisions should come from you, fast, without discussion. Those include risks your team cannot see from where they sit, and anything that commits money or people beyond your own team. Your boss will also expect certain calls to be yours personally, and you know which ones.

Write that list down. It will be shorter than you expect. Everything not on it is a decision you have been taking out of habit, and each one is a chance for someone else to practise. Say the list out loud to your team, so they know which questions still come straight to you and which they should arrive with a view on. How many of today's decisions were on that list?

It will be slower before it is faster

For a quarter or so, things will take longer. Some decisions will be worse than the ones you would have made. Your team may suspect this is a test, or that you have stopped caring, and one or two will keep bringing you empty problems to see whether the old arrangement still holds.

Keep doing it anyway, and be the same about it on a bad day as on a good one. If you go back to answering the moment something goes wrong, you will have taught them that thinking is only allowed when the stakes are low. That is worse than where you started.

This week, count how many times you give an answer before anyone has offered one. Then pick one person, and start with them.