090 | The 2-Minute Rule: How Female Founders Use AI to Train Teams to Stop Asking Permission for Everything

If your team asks you to approve things like lunch orders, calendar invites, or formatting choices, you’ve accidentally become the Chief Permission Officer. 

This bottleneck drains your time, chips away at their confidence, and slows the whole company down.

In this episode of She’s That Founder, I’m sharing the 2-Minute Rule and how to use AI to retrain your team so they stop asking for permission on every little thing and start making confident decisions on their own.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• Why even your smartest hires default to asking permission—and why it’s actually a sign of respect, not incompetence
• The 2-Minute Rule framework that frees you from constant approvals
• Three AI systems that help your team build decision-making confidence:
  • Decision Classifier (sorts yes/no/judgment call decisions)
  • Confidence Builder (validates their reasoning against company context)
  • Documentation Trail (tracks choices for accountability and improvement)
• How to run a Permission-to-Autonomy Conversation that explicitly shifts your team from approval-seeking to independent action

Episode at a Glance

• [00:00] – Why approval-seeking slows everything down
• [03:00] – The 2-Minute Rule explained
• [07:00] – Three AI systems that train autonomy
• [14:00] – The Permission-to-Autonomy conversation

Resources and Links Mentioned in This Episode

• Free Guide: 10 Ways AI Will Make You a Better Leader

Want to increase revenue and impact? Listen to “She's That Founder” for insights on business strategy and female leadership to scale your business. Each episode offers advice on effective communication, team building, and management. Learn to master routines and systems to boost productivity and prevent burnout. Our delegation tips and business consulting will advance your executive leadership skills and presence.

Transcript

She's That Founder
090 | The 2-Minute Rule: How Female Founders Use AI to Train Teams to Stop Asking Permission for Everything

Your team member just asked you to approve a lunch order for a client meeting. Not the restaurant choice, not the budget, the actual lunch order. Should I get Caesar salad or the chicken sandwich for the Johnson presentation? This person manages a $50,000 project budget. Negotiates contracts with vendors and runs client presentations, but somehow choosing between a salad or a sandwich requires your executive input.

If this sounds absurd, but familiar, you've accidentally trained your team to treat you like the chief Permission Officer, and the cost isn't just your time. It's their confidence, your sanity, and the company's ability to operate without you.

You are listening to. She's That founder, the show that helps ambitious women stop drowning in decisions and start owning their CEO seat with a little AI magic. I'm Dawn Andrews, and today we're talking about the two minute rule. How to train your team to stop asking permission for everything and start making decisions with confidence. 

And by the end of this episode, you'll understand three key things. 

First, why smart, capable people suddenly become helpless decision avoiders when they work for you and why? This pattern actually indicates respect, not incompetence. 

Second, you'll learn the two minute rule framework and three AI systems that train your team to distinguish between decisions they can make and decisions that need your input.

And third, you'll learn how to have permission to autonomy conversations that shift your team from asking to acting without losing quality control or creating chaos. Sounds pretty good, right? 

Well, here's how this whole thing came about. I discovered this pattern during a coaching call with my client, rose, who runs a financial consulting firm, and this was her story.

She said, I hired a directing of learning.  I hired a director of learning and development who used to design corporate training programs for Fortune 500 companies. I asked her to create a repeatable curriculum for our junior consultants.

Sounds simple, right? But every single day she came to me with questions. Should module one be 90 minutes or two hours? Do you want case studies in PowerPoint or PDF format? Should I use your company colors or create a distinct palette for these presentations?

And Rose was thinking. Girl, you've built training programs for companies with 50,000 employees. Why can't you design a curriculum for 12 people without my constant input? So I don't know if this sounds familiar to you, but if you have team members who keep coming to you for every little thing, here's what's actually happening.

They're experiencing what I call founder proximity paralysis. They recognize that you, as the founder, have context that they don't. They see you making quick decisions based on years of experience and pattern recognition that you have, and they're terrified of making the wrong choice because they don't wanna disappoint you or damage the business that you've built.

And so they default to asking instead of acting, not because they're incompetent, but because they respect your expertise and are afraid of overstepping. 

The problem is you've accidentally created a system where  asking permission feels safer than taking responsibility, and every time you approve that lunch order or meeting format choice, you're reinforcing that dynamic. 

You've become the bottleneck, not because your team is incapable, but because they're trying to be respectful of your authority. 

I see this happen so often in female founded businesses, and I see it happen with businesses that are heavy on female employees. We're socialized to be told what to do, and it takes a lot for us to shift out of that mode of thinking, and it's necessary and important and good for the growth of every woman. In any professional capacity. 

So I'm gonna walk you through why this happens and how AI can help fix it systematically.

Because it isn't about changing their personalities, it's just about changing the system, and that's the good part. So here is why smart people act helpless. I want you to first understand the psychology of this permission seeking behavior because once you see the pattern, you can totally interrupt it.

When capable people join your team, they bring their own decision making ability, obviously, which is why you've hired them. But they also bring uncertainty about your standards and your priorities and your boundaries. 

They don't know what's important to you versus what's routine. And often as a busy founder, you're moving too fast to distinguish those things.

And even if you've managed to clone yourself somewhat with SOPs. It's not like a new employee in a smallish company is gonna spend a lot of time reading through all that documentation, and it never is helpful because the SOPs aren't right at hand or at their fingertips when they need to make a snap decision. 

So they start asking you about everything until they learn your preferences. The problem is if you keep answering every question, they never learn the strategic thinking to distinguish between decisions that need your input and decisions they can handle independently.

You've accidentally trained them. That checking with you is always the safest choice, and you need to check in with your own psychology to see if there's a little something there. You need to look into. 

So there are three types of decisions that your team faces every day.

The obvious YES Decisions. These are low risk, reversible within established guidelines like ordering supplies, scheduling routine meetings, responding to standard client questions, and then there are obvious NO Decisions. These are high risk against company policy outside their authority, like changing contract terms, making pricing decisions, or making or breaking major client commitments.

So we've got both ends of the spectrum, but there's a ton that is in the third category, which is the Judgment Call Decisions, and that's the majority of decision making in any person's job function. And the judgment call decisions require context, experience, strategic thinking, like handling difficult client situations, or prioritizing competing projects or navigating team conflicts.

That's a lot of gray area that both you and your team are navigating. And the 2-minute rule framework helps them distinguish between these categories without having to ask every time.

Hey, so if you're seeing that this two minute rule idea might be able to transform your team's confidence and your time, grab my free guide 10 Ways AI will Make you a Better Leader.

It includes more AI frameworks for building autonomous teams without losing control. And you can grab it at hellodawn.live/ai10 ways. 

Okay. Welcome back. Let me go through, let's go through the two minute rule framework and the three AI systems that can make a difference for you.

Here's how the 2-minute rule works. If it would take you less than two minutes to approve their request, they should just do it and inform you later. But the magic isn't in the rule itself. It's in the AI systems that help them apply it with confidence. 

So here are the AI systems that make that difference.

AI system number one, the decision classifier. You can create an AI prompt that helps them evaluate decisions before coming to you. 

Here's what a prompt like that might look like. "Evaluate this decision, then classify it as obvious yes, low risk, reversible within guidelines obvious no high risk against policy, outside authority, or a judgment it's a judgment call. It needs context and experience for the obvious. Yes, proceed and inform Rose. For an obvious no. do not proceed Document the reasoning. And for a judgment call, bring it to rose with your recommendation and reasoning."

 So when they wonder about the lunch order, the AI would respond.

Decision type obvious. Yes. Reasoning both options are within the $25 meeting budget. Client appropriate choices, fully reversible decision. The action, choose one and include that choice in a meeting recap to Rose. 

So it may seem silly to create this AI to help them sort decisions out, but it's a great starting point to set this up and test it to see what starts to happen with your team and to see how much time it reduces with their engagement with you on things that they could probably handle themselves.

So with that AI system, they have a way to evaluate decisions without defaulting to asking you. Cool. Right. You can take your time training each person that is coming to you for these decisions. And most founders that I know have anywhere from five to seven to 10 direct reports depending on the size and stage of their business.

If you're thinking about 10 people with a lot of gray area in that judgment call decision making space, and you're needing to train them all to think like you, to understand your strategy, to apply it to a business context. That's a lot of people busting in and interrupting your strategic and visionary thinking time for stuff that they could be handling themselves.

So here's a second AI system you might wanna try, and it's the confidence builder. You can create an AI system that validates their thinking and builds decision confidence. 

And here's the framework. I'm giving you an actual prompt. You're considering this decision based on company guidelines. This appears to be within your authority because potential risks are the recommended action is, and the confidence level in this assessment is.

So, this is something that the AI could share back with your team member. And for these two examples that I've given you so far. The best way to do this, like to actually implement this, is to create a custom GPT with knowledge based docs. You can put all your SOPs in there so that they inform the decision making.

You can put your business strategy, your goals for the year, your revenue goals, KPIs, et cetera. And then you basically have cloned the strategic part of yourself and you use that custom GPT for your team members to ask before they come to you.

So here's what it looks like in practice. You're considering scheduling the client presentation for Tuesday versus Thursday.

This is what AI would give you back, right? When you use the custom GPT, you're considering scheduling the client presentation for Tuesday versus Thursday based on company guidelines. This appears to be within your authority because both dates meet the one week advance notice policy. The client has expressed flexibility and there's no conflicting team commitments.

Potential risks, low. Recommended action, Proceed with Tuesday. Confirm 24 hours prior confidence level, 95%.

Now I get that this sounds like totally crazy robot stuff, right? And probably way more formal than something that you'd like you'd like to implement with your team. But I'm giving you the crazy robot stuff because once you create that custom GPT for your team. You can adjust it to the tone and culture and style of your company. 

The AI system doesn't just tell 'em what to do, it shows them how to think through the decisions using company context and guidelines. And let me just tell you, in putting all of this together and the amount of clarity that you come to about what's important to you, both as a leader, but also for the culture of the company and your goals is extraordinary. The experience of it is really, um, game changing and levels up how your business operates.

So really strongly consider creating that custom GPT, because what happens is then your team can start developing that same decision making framework that you use instead of just asking you for your conclusions.

And that's worth its weight in gold. What if you could cut down that training time and strategic thinking time so that they start to pick it up and learn it, and are taught in collaboration with using that custom GPT. 

Okay. The last AI system, this is the documentation trail, and the key to this working well is tracking what decisions they're making independently so you can course correct if needed.

So  what you wanna be able to do is have it start documenting these decisions or the decisions that are made, the reasoning and the outcome. And pro tip, you can take some of your meeting discussions, the transcripts from your meetings, and pull out your strategic thinking or your explanation as the founder to be able to add to this.

And once those decisions are made, or your team is documenting how they're making their own decisions, they can send it to you as a summary review. And if you would have done it differently or would have advised them differently, they can add that back into the GPT to make it better for the next time.

So this creates accountability without micromanagement.

I get that implementing AI and custom GPT into your business may feel like, holy cow, this is way more than I expected, and I'm not gonna lie. The implementation and getting it set up does take a minute. 

But when you consider what it would take to train those 3, 5, 7, 10 employees in your strategic way of thinking, the company vision, the goals, not only their own personal goals, but across the whole company. If that can live in one place that they can go to to ask questions before they come to you, it can significantly improve the operational skill, capacity, and strategic thinking of your team without you needing to be the person making all the decisions every time, or having to walk them through why you made the decision you made.

I just want you to take that in for a second. And I hope that you understood it the way that I described it. Sometimes I can get a little esoteric, but I'm just saying, what would that be like if you could quickly train up and also have future access to your way of thinking for your team without them having to come to you every single time?

Right. That's what's powerful about this approach. When you implement these AI systems, you're not just reducing your decision load, you're actually training your team to think like leaders instead of task executors.

But here's what's not to do. Do not implement this without clear boundaries, without a rules of a gate, without a document or stated rules of engagement with AI.

I had one client whose team started making budget decisions they should not have been because the two minute guideline wasn't specific enough about dollar amounts and approval authority. 

So there are places that this can go wrong, and in this world of transitioning to AI, I know all of us as founders are feeling like a little shaky about letting go of control.

But in order for you to grow and scale, in order for your people to grow. You've got to be able to share your strategic thinking process with them so that they can take that on fully. 

And I'm offering you today through use of AI one avenue to get that done. That's a little bit lower lift and a whole lot faster than you doing it all yourself. 

This is the last part of the framework. This is called the permission to autonomy conversation, and this is the human part that needs to happen. This is a conversation framework that makes this transformation work. You can't just throw AI systems in the mix and hope that your team will figure it out.

You need to explicitly give them permission to stop asking permission. So here's the conversation and I want you to imagine yourself on the receiving end of this. You're the boss. I know that's why we're talking to each other. But at the same time, I want you to put yourself in the shoes of your team, of your employees, and imagine receiving this conversation.

"I hired you because you're capable of making good decisions, but I realize I've accidentally trained you to check with me on things you could handle independently. Starting now, we're implementing the two minute rule. If it would take me less than two minutes to approve your request, just do it and tell me later. If you need to use the AI decision classifier to help you distinguish between those kinds of decisions that you can make or decisions that need my input. And the AI systems will help you think through choices using our company context and guidelines. I would rather you make a few imperfect decisions independently than make no decisions without my approval. If you make a choice, I would've done differently. We'll treat it as a learning opportunity, not a failure."

Wow. Right. What would it be like to receive that conversation? So  from there you can explain the new process and how you want it to work.

So instead of, can I schedule the meeting for Tuesday, just schedule it and include it in your weekly update. Instead of, should I respond to this client email? Use the AI to evaluate whether it's a routine response or a complex response, and then come to me with your draft.

Check if it's within the budget and guidelines, and if yes, order it. If no, let's discuss it in our next check-in.

But here's the crucial part. And I'm talking back to you now, not you receiving the conversation. 

Here is the crucial part. You have to resist the urge to jump back in. When they make choices, you would've done differently.

I mean, this is like the equivalent of loading and reloading the dishwasher if their decision was reasonable, given the information that they had, let it stand. Only course, correct. If it violates actual guidelines, creates real problems, causes real financial impact.

Rose from our earlier story, told me six weeks later, my training director just launched the curriculum without asking me about the font choices, break timing or handout formatting.

And you know what? It's better than anything I would've designed because you focused on the learning outcomes instead of getting lost in my preferences. 

That is why this is so crucial and makes such a big difference for you. The goal is building your people's confidence to act, not to maintain perfect control over every choice.

And here's the leadership force multiplier, which you know I am all about. Teach the system to your other leaders. I'm asking you to use it with your direct reports, but I'm asking you to also teach this process to your direct reports to use with who reports to them.

If you have department heads or team leads, show them how to implement the two minute rule with their people. When everyone in leadership stops being the bottleneck for routine decisions, your entire organization becomes more responsive and proactive, not to mention more confident and moves with more speed.

This kind of systematic delegation where AI helps your team make better decisions independently while you maintain strategic oversight is exactly what we build inside the AI Leadership Accelerator. But I don't wanna overwhelm you.

So start with that 10 ways guide to test these frameworks with your team first.

Okay, here's what we covered today. ' cause you know, I like a recap and I like some action items. It's all about the action. 

Smart people that you have hired, act helpless when they work for you, because they're trying to be respectful of your expertise, not because they're incompetent, but this creates a permission seeking dynamic that makes you the bottleneck for every decision.

The 2-minute rule framework helps them distinguish between the types of decisions they can make and the decisions that need your input.

And then the three AI systems that you can put into a custom GPT, the decision classifier, the confidence builder, and the documentation trail. Give them the tools they need to apply these rules systematically based on your important company information.

And then finally, the permission to autonomy conversation. Explicitly shifts them from asking to acting with AI support and learning focused feedback that has their back. 

So here's your action steps for this week. Notice how many questions you get that would take you less than two minutes to approve what's the volume?

Pick one team member and have that permission to autonomy conversation. Implement the AI decision classifier for one category of decisions they ask about frequently. And if you're not ready to implement AI, just create a document, an SOP something to acknowledge the distinctions, and then watch how their confidence grows when they have clear frameworks for independent decision making instead of just hoping they're doing what you want.

If you're ready to stop being the Chief Permission Officer and start building a team that acts with confidence, grab that report 10 Ways AI will make you a better leader. You can find it at hellodawn.live/ai10ways.

You'll get AI frameworks that build team autonomy without losing quality control. Because your job isn't to approve every decision. It's to build people that can make good decisions independently. That's how you scale leadership beyond yourself. 

We got right into it today and I hope that it's left you feeling more empowered and like there's some possibility of getting above the fray the fray with all the tiny decision making, questions that come your way and the interruptions that always go with it.

I just want you to know you're amazing. You've got this AI can be really easy to bring into your business and can change your life for the better. So have confidence, have courage, and take that next action step. I'll catch you next time Lovey.