Decision Debt: The Hidden Cost of Making Every Call Yourself

Every decision you make that someone else should have made is costing you more than time.

Most founders think they’re being responsible when they stay in the weeds. Reviewing every hire. Approving every budget line. Weighing in on every client issue. It feels like leadership. It’s actually debt.

Let’s call it Decision Debt. And it compounds faster than you think. At least it did for me!

Here’s how it works. Every time you make a decision that should live at a different level of your organization, you create two problems. First, you slow the company down. Second, you train your team to wait. Over time, those small moments of “let me just handle this” stack up into an organization that can’t move without you.

We’re living this right now at Rise. Two years in, over 500 agents, and I still catch myself jumping into decisions that have no business being on my plate. Not because my team can’t handle them. Because the habit of doing everything dies hard.

Let me give you a real example. A few months ago, I realized I was still involved in approving almost every finance related item in the company. Stuff that should have been handled two levels below me. When I asked why it was still routing to me, the answer was uncomfortable. “Because you always want to approve things before we spend money, so people just kept sending it up.”

That’s Decision Debt in action. I created the pattern. And the pattern became the culture. My team wasn’t being weak. They were being rational. Why risk making a call the founder might override?

The Decision Debt Audit

So here’s what we’re building right now. I’m calling it The Decision Debt Audit. Three questions that expose where the debt is hiding in your organization.

Question One: What decisions hit your desk this week that someone else could have made?

Not “should have” in theory. Could have, right now, with the information and authority they already possess. Most founders I talk to realize at least 60% of their weekly decisions fall into this category. That’s not leadership. That’s a bottleneck wearing a leadership costume.

Question Two: Where is your team waiting instead of acting?

This is the sneaky one. Decision Debt doesn’t just show up as things landing on your plate. It shows up as silence. Projects stalling. Timelines slipping. Not because people are lazy… because they’re waiting for a green light that shouldn’t be required.

At Rise, we’re starting to track “wait time” on key initiatives. How long between someone identifying a need and taking action. The number was embarrassing. Not because our people were slow. Because our decision architecture was broken.

Question Three: What decisions are you making out of habit, not necessity?

This one requires honesty. There are things you keep doing because you’ve always done them. Not because the company needs you to. That marketing approval I mentioned? Pure habit. I’d been doing it since we were five people. We’re now at 500+. The habit didn’t scale. It just created drag.

Paying It Down

Here’s what paying down Decision Debt actually looks like. It’s not just “delegate more.” That’s too vague to be useful. It’s three specific moves.

Move One: Create a Decision Charter for every leader on your team. What decisions they own outright. What decisions they escalate. What decisions require collaboration. Write it down. Make it explicit. If it lives in your head, it doesn’t exist.

We’re in the midst of finalizing “A-Player” agreements with all of our staff that state exactly what we believe an A-player in their role would look like. Can you guess what’s a foundational part of that agreement? Correct, what decisions they own and what should be elevated up the org chart.

Move Two: Kill the “run it by me” culture. Every time someone says “let me check with Chris” about something they should own, that’s a signal the debt is still compounding. Call it out. Celebrate autonomous decisions, even imperfect ones. A wrong decision made quickly teaches more than a right decision made slowly through the founder.

Move Three: Schedule a daily “Farewell” time block. 15-30 minutes at the end of the day. Look at every decision you touched that week. Ask yourself: “Did this need to be me?” If the answer is no, shoot a Loom video on how it’s done and send it off to the person in your organization who is responsible for that item now.

I’m doing this every day now. It’s uncomfortable. Because every time I find a decision that shouldn’t have been mine, I have to confront the fact that I was the one keeping it there.

The Real Cost Nobody Talks About

Here’s what founders miss about Decision Debt. The cost isn’t just your time. It’s your team’s growth.

Every decision you make for someone else is a rep they don’t get. A muscle they don’t build. A confidence they don’t develop. Over months and years, that creates leaders who can execute but can’t think independently. And then you wonder why you can’t step away. The irony is brutal. The more decisions you make, the more decisions you need to make. It’s a loop. And the only way to break it is to start making fewer of them. On purpose.

Think about it this way. A gym where the trainer does all the reps doesn’t produce strong athletes. It produces an exhausted trainer and a weak team. That’s what Decision Debt does to your organization. You get stronger while everyone around you stays dependent.

The Challenge

So here’s my challenge for you this week. Track every decision that comes to you. Every approval, every opinion request, every “what should we do about this.” Write them down.

Then ask yourself one question: How much of this is leadership… and how much of it is just debt I haven’t paid off yet?

The answer will tell you exactly where your company’s growth ceiling lives. And the good news? Decision Debt is the easiest kind of organizational debt to start paying down. You just have to be willing to let go.

We’re still working through this at Rise. I won’t pretend it’s perfectly solved. But every decision I remove from my plate is one more unit of capacity I’m giving back to the organization. And that compounds too… just in the right direction.