096 | The CEO Trap: How AI Ends Your Decision Fatigue and Frees You to Lead

Are you crushed under the weight of being the decision czar in your business? 

Does your to-do list include tasks your team should handle? Then it's time for a leadership upgrade.

If you're the CEO who still picks slide colors, approves every invoice, and solves all the "quick questions," this episode is your wake-up call. 

Today, we break down why great decision-making isn't your superpower anymore—decision architecture is. 

Learn how to train your team to think like you (without needing you), free up your time for true CEO work, and finally step out of the weeds and into your strategic zone of genius.

Key Takeaways:

• Why your decision-making skills are actually holding back your business growth
• The 4 types of decisions every founder must identify.
• How to stop being your team’s crutch by building scalable decision frameworks
• The mental cost of unnecessary decisions (spoiler: it’s more than time)
• Practical scripts and steps to empower your team without sacrificing standards

Grab it:

• Free Guide: 10 Ways AI Will Make You a Better Leader
• Book a free Transition Assessment Call with Dawn: dawnandrews.com

Join it:

• Free Community: AI for Founders

Related episodes to keep you in your CEO flow:

EP 072 How Female Founders Delegate Like a CEO Before They Burn Out

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
096 | The CEO Trap: How AI Ends Your Decision Fatigue and Frees You to Lead

Hey, levy, some real talk. 

How many decisions did you make yesterday that literally anyone else could have handled? The vendor choices, email approvals, meeting times whether a slide should be Navy or Ian and FYI that is the same color. 

Let me guess. Perhaps you're counting right now, are you? Aren't you? 

But if that number is higher than three, congratulations. You've built yourself the world's most expensive to-do list and it's costing you way more than time. It's costing you the ability to actually lead. 

And here's the thing that nobody's telling you. Every time someone asks, what should I do? And you answer, you're teaching them that thinking is optional. 

You're the CEO of a company that can't function without you, which sounds impressive until you realize you've created a very lucrative prison and get this. A McKinsey survey found that inefficient decision making costs typical Fortune 500 companies, 530,000 days of manager's time each year.

Now that's about 250 million in annual wages, just gone. poof. Now for that, that's for a Fortune 500 company it's not for your small business, but I would argue that those kinds of dollars at your scale are even more critical, and here's what really gets me. 

While you're approving invoices, there are industries that are waiting to be disrupted. There are movements waiting to be led or other women watching to see if it's actually possible to build something big or build something meaningful without sacrificing everything. 

You didn't start your business to become a highly paid decision making machine. You started it to create something that matters, to prove something, to change something, and today we're breaking out, so you can actually do that. 

Hey, hey, hey. You're 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, your host, and today we're talking about how to stop being the bottleneck in your own business, and this won't come as a surprise to you. We've talked about decision making in other episodes. 

Today we're talking about decision architecture, and by the end of this episode, you will understand three critical things.

First, why decision architecture matters way more than your decision making skills. Second, we'll talk about the four types of decisions one makes in leading a company and which ones you need to keep versus which ones are quietly killing your capacity to lead. And then third, we'll talk about how to train your team to make decisions the way you would without needing you in the room every time.

So let's dive in. For those of you that are catching this on YouTube. I'm rolling in my messy bun, in my sweatshirt, and that's pretty much how every single one of these podcasts is gonna be recorded because I do this on my down days. So there you go. Enjoy the casualness of working with me. 

Okay, I'm gonna set the scene. 

I'm gonna tell you about a client that I was working with a few months ago. Another brilliant woman, a founder of a production company, entertainment production company, who built the whole thing from scratch. 

She had a team of 12 talented people, and every single morning there was literally a line outside her office. Can we approve this invoice? Should we push the meeting back? What colors should the backdrop be for the Thursday shoot. 

She was making so many decisions a day, some strategic, most of them not. She knew something was wrong because she'd finished the day exhausted, but couldn't point to a single thing that she'd actually built or moved forward.

She was managing, which is great, but she was reacting, not creating, and not leading, really. Does this sound familiar to you? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not, but here's what really was frustrating about her situation. 

She was super good at making those decisions. She was fast, she was decisive, and that's why people kept coming to her. But being good at something doesn't mean you should be doing it, especially as your business grows. 

That's like being a surgeon who's also really good at mopping floors. Sure, you could mop floors, but should you, and more importantly at what cost. Because while she was choosing backdrop colors, her competitors were designing their next market move.

While she was approving small invoices, somebody else was building partnerships that would change their business. She wasn't losing to bad people or bad luck. She was losing her growth to her own competence. 

And what broke my heart is that she would tell me about this industry changing idea she had this thing that could shift how production companies as a whole, not just hers, fundamentally operated, but she couldn't work on it because she was too busy choosing backdrop colors. The vision that got her to start the company was gathering dust while she managed the machinery. And that is not just inefficiency, that's a tragedy. 

Now, here's what she didn't realize at first. The problem wasn't that she had bad people. She had great people. The problem was that she had accidentally built a system where everything required her input. She just created a culture of Just Ask me, because honestly, it felt faster in the moment than explaining how to decide, and it also kept her quality control in the zone that she was comfortable and confident with.

But over time, that faster approach created a business that literally couldn't function without her constant presence. And that is the CEO trap. 

So let's start with a distinction that most people miss. Stay with me here because this is important. There's a massive difference between being good at making decisions and being good at architecting decision systems.

And let's be honest, for you to be where you are in your business, you are probably scary, good at making decisions. That's how you got here. While other people were still gathering data or considering all the perspectives, you were five steps ahead building the damn thing and amen to that. 

Way to go you. But here's where it gets messy. 

That superpower becomes kryptonite. The second you build a team and that team crosses three people. Because when you're good at decisions, people learn to bring everything to you, and you say yes, because honestly, it's faster for you just to decide than to explain your thinking, especially when you're in a hurry, especially when you're not even sure you could explain why you know what you know and why that's important. 

So you make the call and they walk away relieved and everybody just reinforces the dependency. I don't know what you're thinking, but I'm guessing it's probably along the lines of, "but Dawn, I can decide in 30 seconds. Why would I spend 10 minutes teaching them how to decide?"

Now? That's a fair question. So here's why, and here's what the research tells us. A CEO makes an average of 50 high stakes decisions per day. But here's the kicker. Almost 20% of an executive's time is wasted because of Ineffective decision making. 

So how does that work exactly? I mean, the bottom line is that's one full day a week spent on decisions that could happen without you like that you don't have to be the person to decide. 

So here's a real example. Last week a client told me her director asked if they could approve a $300 software subscription. She said yes. Three hours later, she was still thinking about whether she made the right call. That $300 decision cost her three hours of mental bandwidth. That's the cost. 

Here's what that costs you, and I really want you to hear this first, it costs you your time. Obviously, you're spending hours making decisions that shouldn't be on your desk. Second. It costs you your team's growth. When you make every decision. They don't develop judgment. They develop the skill of asking you. 

That's it. 

Research shows that when employees aren't given autonomy to make decisions, they experience decreased motivation. Lower morale and they stop taking accountability for their work. They just follow orders. And the thing that's even more frightening about that is that they disconnect from the vision altogether, so when you make a decision and you tell them what to do, they're not retaining that information. 

They're just executing that thing in the moment and moving on to ask you again for the next thing, so there's no absorption of what it is that you're trying to accomplish. They're not actually improving their skills, they're just improving their ability to ask you quickly, respond quickly, and move on to the next item, the global thinking, the critical thinking is going away. 

That's terrifying to me. 

And then third, it's costing you your strategic capacity. A University of Cambridge study found that 60% of executives experienced impaired judgment after prolonged decision making sessions, because every time you're approving an invoice or picking a meeting time, you're not thinking about where your business needs to go next.

You're not designing the future, you're managing the present. 

I mean, have you gotten home at the end of the day and just gotten to the place where you're like, I don't wanna decide anymore about anything. My husband frequently will ask me, "what do you think for dinner tonight? You know, chicken or fish?" I mean, whatever it is. 

And I'm like, "you're the driver. I don't know. I got nothing. Right?" And here's what kills me about this. You have ideas that could change your industry. You have ideas that could transform your business. You are likely seeing opportunities that other people might be missing.

And you have the strategic brain that could build something genuinely groundbreaking, but that brain is being used to decide whether the backdrop should be blue or teal. 

This is not a time management problem, that's a leadership crisis. 

So let's flip this. Instead of asking, how do I make better decisions, ask, how do I design a system where the right decisions happen at the right level without me? That's decision architecture, and it starts with understanding that not all decisions are created equal. Get it. It takes time and practice, but you'll start.

And you'll iterate on it. You don't need to be a decision architect expert, I just want you to start shifting your thinking. Which brings us to the second piece, the four decision types. 

I'm gonna share with you the framework I use with every founder I work with. And sometimes it's overt, meaning I share these decision types with them and sometimes I just know what they are behind the scenes and help move things forward in my conversations with them. It's super simple, but it completely changes how you structure your business. 

So there are four types of decisions. And once you see this, you can't unsee it, which is awesome. It's sort of like riding a bike, right? Once you learn, you can't unlearn. You just get that balance. So I'm gonna walk you through them. 

Four types. Type one, Strategic Decisions. These are the big picture calls that shape the direction of your company. Should we enter a new market? Should we pivot our service model? Should we add a vertical? Who should be on the leadership team? 

These decisions are yours. You are the CEO. You are the founder. This is your job. These should stay with you and you should protect the time and mental space to make them well. That's type one, Strategic decisions, 

Type two. Policy decisions. Now here's where it gets a little interesting. These are essentially decide once implement forever decisions. What's our refund policy? How do we handle client changes after a contract is signed? What's our process for onboarding new team members?

So as the founder, you set the policy. You said it once, you document it and then everyone follows it without needing to ask you each time the situation comes up. Okay. Quick story. I had a client who was getting asked about their late payment policy every single month. Every single month, she'd answer the same question, make the same decision, give the same reasoning for two years.

Finally, I said, what if you just write it down once? Revolutionary, right? I know. I was very proud of myself. She spent 20 minutes documenting it and shared it with her team, put it in the SharePoint, and she hasn't been asked since. This is where most founders leave massive leverage on the table. They keep making the same decision over and over because they never bothered to turn it into policy.

And the bottom line, if you're making the same decision more than twice, it's not a decision, it's a policy waiting to be documented and what a great opportunity. Right? Okay, so type one, strategic decisions, those are yours. Type two, policy decisions. Those are yours until you document them and hand 'em off.

Type three, Operational Decisions. Okay. Are you ready? Prepare your heart. Stay with me because this is where the magic happens. These are decisions with clear criteria that someone else can apply. Should we approve this invoice? Does this project meet our quality standards? Should we move forward with this vendor? 

If you can articulate the criteria. The budget limit, a quality checklist, vendor requirements, then someone else can make the call. They just need to know what you're optimizing for. Your job here isn't to make the decision. It's to define what good looks like so that someone else can.

So here's an example. Instead of saying, check with me on all invoices, you say Approve any invoice under 500 that's from a pre-approved vendor and matches the scope we agreed on. If it's outside that, flag it for me.

Now, if you're in a much larger company, you may already be way past some of this documentation and decision making. If you're in a company of 25, 30, 50 and beyond, you may already have all of this stuff, but I can tell you from a client list, I've worked with plenty of founders that do not at that size of a team. 

This is real, and I'm saying it because I just want you to know if you're in that space and you feel like, oh my God, I can't believe I haven't done this already, or I should have done it, I just want you to know you're not alone, right?

Like that is the thing with being a founder is that start your business, feet on the ground running, and you never stop. If you are fortunate enough to be great with marketing and advertising and leads and bringing in sales and serving your clients. The idea of stepping back to document this stuff, it just doesn't occur to you, until you are burning out, until you have a cap on what you're able to accomplish and grow.

So hopefully this is showing you a pathway and I want you to see a difference with these operational decisions. You're giving them a thinking framework, not just having them ask you for permission. So strategic decisions, policy decisions, operational decisions, and are you ready for the last one? Here we go.

Type four, Tactical Decisions. These are the day-to-day execution decisions. What time should we schedule the meeting? Which software do we use for the task? What color should this graphic be? Wait for it.

Tactical decisions. Should never reach you ever. If they are, you've got a decision architecture opportunity in front of you. And I can hear some of you probably already thinking, but Dawn, they don't think like me. They'll mess it up. Possibly two things I'd like to offer first, they're never gonna think like you if you keep making every decision. That's like expecting somebody to learn piano only by watching you play. It doesn't work. 

And second, and I say this with so much love, you are not as special as you think. Most of your decisions follow patterns you don't even realize you have. And once you identify those patterns they become transferable, and that's when your business becomes scalable instead of installable. 

Okay, so many opportunities here, right? Yes. Okay, so to recap that quickly, strategic decisions, yours, yes you guess that right? Play along with me at home. Policy decisions, yours or theirs? Yours. But you document once and share it with them. Operational decisions. Yours until you give criteria, then theirs and tactical, never yours, always theirs. 

Now, here's your homework and yes, I really invite you to do this. Go back through the last week and categorize every decision you made. How many were type one? Those are fine. Keep 'em. Type two. Those are opportunities, turn them into documented policies so you never have to make them again. How many were type three or type four? Those are where your challenge opportunities are. Those decisions should be happening without you. 

And the goal is simple. 80% of your decisions in your business should happen without your input because you have decision architecture in place and AI can help you with all of this.

And I want you to know, it doesn't mean you're disconnected. It means you're building a system where people know how to think and what to optimize for and when to escalate. That's what lets you lead instead of manage. But here's what I really want for you. Listen, I want you to have the mental bandwidth to think about the big stuff, the business shifting stuff, the industry shifting stuff, the what If we completely imagined how this works stuff.

I want you to be the founder who actually has time to mentor other women coming up behind you, inside your company and outside your company. I want you to have time to speak at that conference, to write that thought leadership piece, to build that partnership or investment that changes everything. 

I want you to look at your calendar and see space for strategy, not just an endless parade of approval requests. That is what decision architecture gives you. Not just time, but the capacity to actually lead something that matters. 

Okay, so you've categorized the decisions. You now know what you need to delegate, document, provide standards for, but you might be thinking, yeah, but they don't know what I would choose. Right. I have a pretty strong sense that that's what you might be thinking. 

So here's the shift. That's not actually the problem. The problem is you haven't given them the, criteria to think like you would. Most founders delegate the task, but not the thinking framework. They say you handle this, but they don't say, here's how to decide, so let's fix that.

Here's how you train someone to make decisions the way you would. Four steps. Stay with me. I know we covered a lot of ground today, but this is one of those trainings that can change your entire business and the entire way that you free up your time. 

First, this is how you're training people to think like you, share your decision criteria. Don't just tell them what you decided. Tell them why. What were you optimizing for? Speed, cost, client experience, quality, revenue, savings, whatever it is. 

For example, instead of saying approve invoices under $500, say, approve any invoice under 500 that's from a pre-approved vendor and matches the scope we agreed upon. If it's outside that, flag it for me. See the difference? You're starting to give them a thinking framework, not just a rule.

Second, you can start to create, if this, then that templates for common scenarios. Most decisions in your business are not that unique. They're variations on a theme. so start to document the pattern. 

And this might be challenging. I'm really not kidding. Part of the reason I'm taking this time to walk through this whole framework. This is like your peak behind the curtain with me. This is what I'm doing behind the scenes with my clients when we're working one-on-one, and I'm laying it all out for you. 

Honestly, this is like the little booklet. You should just have all of this so that you could work through this together, or you could work through this on your own. What you wanna be able to do is start documenting the pattern and you have to start recognizing them so that you can document them. 

For instance, here might be a pattern if a client requests changes after we've started production, here's how to decide whether to accommodate it or charge for it. You know, you already have the thinking behind that, but you may not have documented it out of your head.

Or another example, if a team member asks for time off during a busy period, here's the framework for deciding yes or no. I know that you've made that kind of decision before, so you're not making the decision for the person who's responsible for it. You're giving them the logic that you'd use.

In other words, you're teaching them to fish instead of handing them a fish every single day. 

Okay. Four steps to train people to think like you. Third, give feedback that builds their brain, not their reliance on yours. 

Now, here's where most people get this wrong. When someone makes a decision and brings it to you for approval, stop. Don't just rubber stamp it. Ask them to walk you through their thinking. Talk me through why you decided that. 

If their logic is solid, validate the hell out of it. Yes, that's exactly how I would've thought about it. You nailed it, or, that's interesting, I didn't ever think about it that way, but that is solid. 

And if it's off, coach the thinking, not the outcome. Ah, I see why you went there. Makes sense on the surface, but here's what I would've considered that you might've missed. So I'm giving you actual coaching language that you can use with your team, with your vendors, even with your, outside contractors that help you to develop this skill. And hopefully you're seeing the difference. 

You're building their decision making muscle, not their dependency on your approval. And over time they start to internalize your process and they stop needing you to sign off on everything. 

So the translation, this is beyond delegation. This is multiplication, I hope you're starting to see right before we go into the fourth step of training people to think like you. How much time it's possible to get back when these structures are in place. 

The fourth way to help people think like you is to let them learn. Sometimes they'll make a call you wouldn't have made, and sometimes that's okay and sometimes, it's not, but unless it's going to cost you a client or serious money, please let it play out. Let them see the result so that they can see how judgment develops. 

Okay, here's a quick example. I had a client whose team member approved a rush project that stretched their capacity. She wanted to jump in and fix it, and I said, wait. Let them feel the consequence. Let them learn why you have your policy in place. And Ooh, they did. The team member didn't make that mistake again, and more importantly, they understood the why behind not making that mistake again, they understood the decision architecture. 

Here's what research shows. 79% of employees are engaged when given autonomy at work. They show increased accountability and performance output. And when people have control over how they do their work, they're more motivated, more creative, more innovative, and more productive. 

Yeah, that's the good stuff. Your job as CEO isn't to make every decision. It's to build a team that can make good decisions in your absence, and the only way they learn that is by practicing. So that you, the actual CEO, can do the work only you can do the vision work, the strategic partnerships, the industry changing innovations, the investor conversations, the leadership that makes other women look at you and think, maybe I can do this too. Every hour you spend approving invoices is an hour you're not changing the world really, and the world needs you, and it needs you to change your industry more than it needs you to approve invoices. Can I get an amen? 

Quick pause. If you're listening to this thinking, I need help mapping this out for my actual business. I've got you. I created a free guide called 10 Ways AI Will Make You a Better Leader, one of those ways is helping AI to help you build your decision frameworks and to train your team faster. You can grab it at hellodawn.live/10ways. It'll save you hours and give you a clear starting point.

Alright, let's keep going. 

Here is your truth, for today, and I really want you to hear this. You weren't meant to be the smartest person making every decision. You were meant to be the person building a company full of smart people who can make decisions without you, because leadership isn't about being the best decision maker in the room.

It's about being the best decision builder in the room. But more than that, and this is what I really need you to hear. You have something to contribute to this world that's bigger than your to-do list. Listen, you have an idea that could shift how things are done, not only in your business, but in your industry or for other women,

You have a voice that could inspire the next generation of female founders. You have strategic brilliance that's currently being wasted on tactical garbage. And while everyone's talking about the future being female, I'm too impatient to wait. I need you operating at your highest level. I need you thinking big thoughts and making bold moves, and I need you showing other women what's actually possible when you build a business that doesn't require you to sacrifice your sanity. That's not gonna happen while you're stuck in the weeds deciding whether to use blue or teal.

So here's your assignment, and yes, it's homework this week. Track every single decision you make for one day, just one. You'll be horrified. I promise. It will be so boring, but please do it. Then categorize them, strategic policy, operational, tactical. Then pick three decisions. Type three, type four, and delegate them. Not someday this week. Give the person the decision criteria. Let them make the call. Resist the urge to swoop in and fix it. 

That's how you start building a business that doesn't collapse when you take a vacation or get sick or you decide you'd like to, I don't know, actually have the bandwidth to think about what's next.

Decision architecture. Not decision martyrdom. That's the difference between a job you've created for yourself and a movement that you're leading. 

So if you're ready to actually get out of the CEO trap and build a business that frees you to lead, really lead, not just manage. I would love to help.

You can book a free transition assessment call with me at dawnandrews.com. We'll map out where you're stuck, what decisions you need to let go of, and how to train your team to think like you do so you can get back to the work that actually matters, the work only you can do. 

And in the meantime, grab that free guide, 10 Ways AI will Make You a Better Leader at hellodawn.live/10ways. 

Thanks for being here, Lovie. I'll see you next week for a quick Founder's rant that you're definitely gonna wanna hear. And until then, go be that founder and lead something that matters.