Helping Your Team Make Decisions Without You — Driven for Success Episode 37

Most trucking companies don’t stall because of bad people working there. They stall because the owner is making every decision.

At 5 trucks, that worked just fine. At 15 to 25 trucks, it really starts to strain. And by 40 to 60 trucks, it just full-on breaks.

Your team isn’t the bottleneck. You are, because every decision still runs through you if you’re the owner and you’re still working this way.

A team member asks you a question and you give them a quick answer and everyone moves on with their day, but nothing gets captured, no rule gets created, and the same question comes back every day, every week.

And so you stay in the middle of everything.

Welcome to Driven for Success, the podcast where we help trucking company owners and executives run their business with better process, less chaos, and lower driver turnover.

I’m your host, Mike Ritzema, founder of Superior Trucking Payroll Service, where our mission is simple: help trucking families.

This podcast is one of the ways that we fulfill that mission.

And today, we’re building directly on Episode 34.

This is Episode 37, so go back three episodes if you want to know what we’re talking about.

Not just how to create systems, but how to get your team to make better decisions without you.

Isn’t that really the goal?

Isn’t that what you had in mind when you started the company, that when you got to 30 trucks, people would be able to make these decisions without you?

That’s what we all want, and this will help you get there.

You know, we solved the repeat questions. Now we’re going to solve the decision bottleneck.

Here’s the thing I want you to remember:

People don’t make bad decisions. They lack context.

If someone keeps coming back to you with the same question over and over again, or a very slight variation on the exact same question, it’s not because they’re incapable.

It’s because they didn’t have enough to work with. They didn’t have all the information.

And when people don’t have context, they hesitate, or worse, they guess what you meant.

If you want your team to make better decisions, you have to give them three things:

Rules, guardrails, and examples.

So let’s start with rules.

Rules are non-negotiables. They are evergreen. They are 100% all of the time. They don’t change.

Things like we always pay our drivers correctly, or we never lie to a customer, or our driver hiring requirement requires this many points or less within a year.

Whatever your rules are, those things are absolute, and they remove uncertainty.

So your team doesn’t have to guess on those things.

And if a decision breaks a rule, it’s not a decision. It’s a hard no.

The next part is guardrails.

Your guardrails define the range your team can operate in.

For example, you could say something like:

You can resolve client issues up to $200 without approval.

Or you can give a driver an extra $50 on a load under certain conditions.

Or if you’re booking a backhaul, getting the driver home is more important than maximizing the rate.

It’s not an exact instruction for everything, but it tells them what matters.

And now they can move without stopping to ask you.

Third is examples.

Most owners explain what to do, but they don’t explain the why.

When a situation comes up, don’t just give the answer.

Walk the person through it.

Tell them what you were thinking. Tell them what mattered most.

This is how your team starts to think like you.

So let’s make this real.

A team member brings you a question.

Most owners just answer it and move on.

But that doesn’t fix anything long term.

That question is guaranteed to come back again and again.

If every answer doesn’t become a system, the question is coming back.

Instead, turn that moment into something reusable.

Start with:

Is there a rule?

If not, what are the guardrails?

If not, how would I think through this?

Then explain your thinking.

A good answer solves one problem.

Context solves the next 100.

Your goal is not just to answer questions.

It’s to build a team that can make decisions.

That requires clear rules, defined guardrails, and consistent examples.

If you fix this, your team gets faster.

And when your team gets faster, your business grows.

Thanks for listening.