You have hired someone. Why are you still making every decision?

More people do not automatically solve the founder’s problem.

The moment is easy to recognise. The workload is too high and the answer seems obvious: we need to hire. Then the person arrives and needs to understand the business, the priorities and which decisions they can actually make. Suddenly, there is more on your desk.

Some of that is normal. Good onboarding takes time. But if the pattern continues, the question needs to go beyond whether the person is senior enough. Have we given her an area to take responsibility for, or just a pile of tasks we still manage in detail?

Write down who should achieve what, what a good result looks like and which decisions the person can make. Even a senior hire needs to know this to take work off your hands.

What work should you stop doing?

Before hiring again, examine the workload itself. Which recurring tasks do we do because they are needed? Which do we do because we have always done them? And what could be simplified or handled by a tool under human supervision?

Meetings are a clear example. Someone who wants more control can fill the calendar with more check-ins. For someone who needs uninterrupted time to create or solve a task, those same meetings can slow the work down.

I describe how we have reconsidered a recurring internal meeting at PG. Does everyone need to listen to the same update for an hour? Could some of it be written information? Which discussion actually needs to happen together?

That is more useful than deciding all meetings are bad. The question is what they should achieve and whether the format helps people do the work.

Onboarding has to fit into real life.

A new employee does not join an empty organisation. She arrives among ongoing projects, customer questions and people with full calendars. If nobody has time to explain the context, it is hard to demand independence later.

That is why we also discuss timing in the episode. Onboarding when everyone is running at full speed makes different demands from onboarding when the team has capacity. The point is to plan for the work, rather than find one universal month when everyone should start.

Another useful stress test is to imagine the founder away for 90 days. Which parts keep working? Which decisions stop? What is missing in the team, the information or the authority to decide? The answer shows where the business still depends on particular people.

Owning an area has to mean something.

We readily use words like responsibility, drive and independence. The problem is that they can mean completely different things to two people. The manager thinks she has been clear, while the employee tries to guess what is expected.

Fredrik breaks responsibility into something observable: spot the problem, propose a solution, decide within your authority, follow up on the result and raise the issue when you do not have the authority to act. That also makes it possible to see where something falls short.

Someone who spots every problem but always passes it on needs different development from someone who does not notice the problem at all. ‘Take more responsibility’ is blunt feedback for both.

Make the boundaries concrete instead. Which decisions can the person make alone? When should something be checked with others? What needs to be finished, and how will we review it? The clearer this is, the less everyday work has to revolve around asking permission.

Stop stepping in to rescue every detail.

Delegation does not mean someone else does the task while the founder still decides how, spots every error and makes the final change. The work has moved, but the thinking and the decision remain with the same person.

In the conversation, we distinguish small, manageable mistakes from decisions that could have serious consequences for the business. The wording of an email is not the same as a large purchase that threatens the cash position. The authority you give someone needs to reflect that difference.

For smaller decisions, the person needs room to try, follow up and learn. If the founder always steps in at the end, it becomes unclear who actually owns the outcome. The founder’s initial judgement could also be wrong.

This takes practice from the leader too. Hiring someone for her judgement and then constantly replacing it with your own is a strange way to buy expertise.

Judge the role by the business you are trying to build.

We also need to ask what a successful hire should achieve. Views may tell you something about the content. On their own, they do not tell you whether the work meets the business’s commercial needs. The intended outcome needs to be clear while the role is being designed.

The metrics also need to fit the decisions around the role. We discuss, for example, what happens when a business sharply increases traffic while judging its ecommerce manager against the same conversion rate or returning-customer share as before. A different traffic mix can change the comparison.

That means expectations need to be open to discussion and understood. Which conditions can the person influence? Which are set elsewhere? How will we see whether the business as a whole is improving?

Take a question that still ends up with the founder. What does the person responsible lack to decide it alone: information, experience or authority? Start there before adding another check-in.