Your phone buzzes halfway through dinner. Before you’ve swallowed your last bite of food, your hand’s on the phone to pick it up. It’s not a conscious decision, but a reflex. The family keeps chatting while you move to sequester yourself for what could be a very important call.
It happens to all of us.
I’m never going to discount the possibility of a true emergency, but at some point, I realized I was making myself too available. Weekends, in the middle of my kids’ games, while I was already dressed for me.
I never made myself off limits. Maybe I was just telling myself that that’s what leadership required.
All it really did was split my attention, so I was never fully anywhere. Not home, not work, not on my runs. Not even on vacation. I was just on edge, waiting for the next call.
I’ve mentioned it a handful of times, but I’ve coached competitive soccer for 25 years. One of the very first lessons I learned was that you can’t develop a player’s instincts by calling every play from the sidelines.
Kids learn by making decisions in the moment. Sometimes they’re the wrong ones. But if I’m shouting instructions on every possession, these kids will never build the judgment they need for the moments when I’m not there.
But wasn’t that effectively the same thing I was doing to my team at work?
The Crutch of Unlimited Availability
When you make yourself available at all times, you train your team to default to you rather than trust themselves. Every question they bring to you becomes a problem for you to solve, something they never get to take on themselves.
Over time, this reliance metastasizes into needing permission to make the calls they’re fully capable of making. It becomes easier to ask the boss (who always answers) rather than make decisions themselves.
And that, friends, puts an undue burden on your shoulders and creates a big bottleneck in your processes.
What Your Availability Costs
Obviously, always being available costs me time. The less obvious cost is confidence, which you can only build by doing things yourself. It compromises independence and stops your team from dealing with the discomfort of working without a safety net or figuring out how to fix things.
Every time I was called upon and stepped in without boundaries, I was limiting my team’s growth—even when it felt like good leadership.
Giving the Tools, Then Stepping Back
Your team has everything they need to succeed: training, context, and clear expectations.
Now it’s time for you to step back. Being available at all hours of the day is functionally no different from hovering over their shoulders.
When I realized I wasn’t stepping back enough and needed to draw a line in the sand, I defined what genuinely needed me right away. Think client emergencies, decisions above a certain financial threshold, and anything with legal exposure. Then I made peace with the rest of it.
I didn’t ignore it. But it could wait until I was on the clock.
And you know what? It was uncomfortable. I wasn’t a fan of letting emails sit unanswered, even when it was perfectly reasonable.
But I started seeing decisions made without me. Most of them were solid; some weren’t, but all of them were useful in one way or the other. My team started coming to me with outcomes instead of questions.
“Here’s what we did and why” replaced “What should we do?”
The Obvious Objection
Chris, what happens if something goes wrong when I’m unreachable?
It will happen. It’s the cost of setting that boundary. But a team that never makes mistakes with instant access to you never has the chance to learn to catch its own mistakes.
What we really need is a team that can recognize a problem and course-correct without needing your immediate intervention.
If you have to, make a different protocol for reaching you in a true emergency. Otherwise, you can let some things lie until tomorrow. You can get home from vacation first. If you’ve done your job well, the business won’t burn down without you.
Where do you draw the line between being available and being needed for everything? Tell me how you handle it in the comments.