The Two Questions I Ask Every Team I Take Over

The Bezos Trap

Jeff Bezos once said that if he made three good decisions in a day, that was enough. He protected his sleep and refused to spend his brainpower on hundreds of small calls. The job, he said, was a small number of high-quality decisions, not thousands of low-quality ones.

I love that idea. It sounds clean. The problem is that if you have ever led a real team, you know what happens when you try to apply it. A hundred decisions a day get pushed at you anyway. Every escalation, every customer issue, every staffing call, every exception, every quick question, every judgment call somebody did not want to own. The more capable you are as a leader, the more decisions your team brings you, and if you are not careful, your strength becomes their ceiling.

That was the trap I kept running into. The teams I inherited were not incapable. Most of them were smart and experienced and hard-working. The problem was that the culture had trained them to outsource judgment upward. If there was ambiguity, risk, tension, or a customer issue without an obvious answer, the safest move was to ask the boss. And if the boss always answered, the pattern only got stronger.

So whenever I took over a new team, I started shifting the culture with one simple question. It is the same question my dad asked me when I was a kid, and many years later I understood why he held the line on it.

"Your strength as a leader becomes your team's ceiling, unless you teach them to think for themselves."

The First Question: "What Do You Think?"

When I was growing up, I would ask my dad for help making a decision, and he would just say, "What do you think?" I would say, "Just tell me what I should do," and he would say, "What do you think you should do?"

For example, I asked, "Hey, should I go to this football game tonight? I have homework, but I'm sure I could get it all done when I get back." His response was, "What do you think?" Darn it. That means I must think through the details of my decision and the impact of them, and if that plan doesn't work, it's only my fault.

This drove my siblings and me crazy as kids. We would try so hard to get him to tell us what to do, but he would hold his ground and put the decision back on our shoulders. I'm now thankful for that approach because it taught me how to think, weigh options, decide, and live with it. It's okay to fail. Just own it and try again.

When I take over a new team and they call me to help with a decision, the first couple times I say, "What do you think?" There's usually silence because they haven't thought about it. They just bring it straight to me to do the homework, ask the questions, and tell them where to look or what to think.

Most people want it that way, but that's not how it works. If people can't make their own decisions, you'll never see their true gifts or talents shine, because they'll be limited by your talents as a leader and your ability to guide them.

Why Failure Fridays Matter

Of course, the question isn't the only thing that makes this shift. The team needs to know that failure will not be punished, and they should not be made to feel bad about it. That comes from practice and demonstration in real scenarios.

I ran an initiative for a while called "Failure Fridays." Each week, my leaders would share a failure they had that week, and we would often laugh about it. They would talk about what they learned from it, and it helped other people learn more quickly what works and what doesn't, based on what was going on with their peers.

Those meetings were always entertaining, but they were always positive, and they encouraged risk-taking and decision-making. That is how I took teams from last to first repeatedly.

This is a simple question, but it is not always easy to ask. We are wired to answer questions and provide solutions, and we often have the right answer. The problem is that simply giving it to them does not always help. What this approach does, over and over again, is help a team realize it's okay to make decisions with 80% knowledge. As they practice, their decision-making gets stronger.

Why You Cannot Make It 1% Better

For example, I'm not artistic at all. My stick figures are ugly and out of proportion. Imagine an artist coming up to me and asking, "Which painting do you think I should put on display, this one or this one?" They're the expert. They have the gift in that area. They need to make that decision. When they learn how to think about it and make their own call, the outcomes will be better than if they asked me and I gave them an answer.

Over time, my team learns to think through their decisions before they bring them to me. When I ask, "What do you think?" it can feel almost comical, because they usually tell me their conclusion and I respond, "Yeah, that sounds right. Run with it." They reach the same conclusion I would if I had to think it through, which is exactly what they were trying to get me to do: take on the work and the responsibility.

Eventually, they stopped calling because they realized I would always say, "Sounds good, run with it." I try not to prescribe anything in those situations. Even if I think they should do it a little differently, I let them learn that lesson for themselves, like I did.

There have been times I tried something that failed, and someone else wanted to try it again. It succeeded because they had a different skill set than I do, or saw it in a different way. If I had said, "Yeah, that sounds good, let's change this and this," it would have become my plan, and they no longer have 100% ownership.

"I was trying to make it 1% better, but my '1% better' ended up giving them 0% ownership."

They need to fully own their decisions and the outcomes, knowing I'll have their back. I'll own that I gave them decision-making power, and I'll own coaching them through cleaning up any problem that resulted. That's okay with me.

The Second Question: "What Did Your Peers Say?"

So the first question handles the decisions. There was a second pattern I noticed, though, and it took me a while to see it. Even after a team learned to bring me their own conclusions, they were still calling me. Just with a different shape of problem. They had a question, they didn't know the answer, and they came straight to me to find it.

The first question taught them how to think. It did not teach them where else to look.

That is when I started asking the second question: "What did your peers say?"

My direct reports would call me with a problem that needed to be solved, and they were trying to pass the ownership again. This turns into a never-ending hamster wheel: solving their problems that they could solve themselves. They could get better at solving things on their own, and they have the resources to learn.

When I take over a new team and they call me with a problem, I immediately say, "What did your peers say about that?" After a pause, they always say, "I didn't talk to them." So they did zero homework. They are just passing me every problem so that I must do the work. Multiply that by the number of direct reports you have. You're solving the same problems repeatedly for all your direct reports forever.

I've noticed it takes about two or three asks of "What did your peers say?" before someone has an answer.

What's amazing is that 75% of the time, they don't even get a call back because their peers already knew the answer. They had run into the same issue before and knew how to solve it, or they told them where to go to get the answer right away. They started acting more like a team.

An indirect benefit was that they picked up best practices and deepened relationships. The team culture benefit was dramatic, since they were relying on each other more instead of individually running to me. When someone called me with a problem, it was usually because everyone was dealing with the same problem, and that is my job. That is exactly how I should be spending my time: on problems that impact the whole organization, not just one person.

The Results: Three Turnarounds, 19 Months of Growth

We can only make so many high-quality decisions in a day. This allowed me to focus my brainpower on the problems that mattered most and had the biggest impact, rather than burning energy on all the little issues that arose because someone was too lazy to pick up the phone or look at their resources, or they just never received healthy push back.

I do this to grow and develop my teams, so they become self-sufficient. Not to reduce my workload. I still work the same number of hours, but I focus on more important things. It lets me be strategic and look further ahead, rather than being stuck in the weeds all day every day.

As a senior sales director at Verizon, I led three separate large sales teams across the country, hundreds of people across those roles. Each team was a turnaround. Each one went to number one in the country, and one of those teams strung together 19 consecutive months of year-over-year growth. After I left each team, the leaders kept going. Nimble, working as a team, making their own decisions, winning. The best answers are always on the front lines, not in a corner office.

In my first sales team, it took me two years to get them to number one. It was partway through this role that I realized these questions were important. I relocated and took over another underperforming team, implemented this much earlier, and it took six months. In my final role, I took over another sales team and got it to number one in three months, because I learned to hit this hard at the beginning. I set the expectation right away, so it was less of a surprise.

"Three good decisions a day is the goal. Most leaders never get there because they are spending the day making everyone else's small ones."

Two questions changed that for me. The first one came from my dad, and it taught me how to think. The second one came from leading, and it taught me how to lead.