She's That Founder: Business Strategy, Time Management and AI Magic for Impactful Female Leaders

112 | The 4-Stage AI process Female Founders Use to Stop Losing 10 hours Each Week Answering Questions Their Team Should Own

• Season 2 • Episode 112

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Still doing your team’s job for them?

If your team still needs you to weigh in on every little thing, you don’t have a performance problem. You have a leadership bottleneck. And if you don’t fix it before January, you’re setting yourself up for another year of burnout.

This week on She’s That Founder, Dawn lays down the leadership law on why your team still treats you like human Google. Spoiler: It’s not because they’re incompetent. It’s because you haven’t transferred ownership—just tasks. And that stops now.

You’ll walk away with a 4-stage framework to stop bottlenecking your business, a script for the accountability convo you’ve been avoiding, and an AI-powered way to document the magic in your head so your team can finally lead without you.

Listen if you’re ready to finally step into your CEO seat and stay there.

Join the AI for Founders Community on LinkedIn, the free space for leaders to test AI tools, troubleshoot delegation, and scale smarter together.


Key Takeaways

  • Tasks ≠ Ownership: Telling your team to “handle it” doesn’t work if you haven’t shared your thinking process.
  • Why AI is your delegation secret weapon: Use tools like ChatGPT to turn your brain into SOPs—fast.
  • The 4-Stage Ownership Transfer Model: From documenting your decisions to full delegation with strategic check-ins.
  • “Done properly when…” statements: How to define success clearly so your team stops guessing.
  • The exact phrase to say when someone drops the ball—without being a jerk.


Resources & Links

 “I make decisions about [X] all the time. Help me identify the factors I consider, the frameworks I use, and the criteria that matter most.”


Related Episodes:

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.

She's That Founder
112 | The 4-Stage AI process Female Founders Use to Stop Losing 10 hours Each Week Answering Questions Their Team Should Own

It's December you're trying to close out the year you're planning for Q1, and Your team is still asking you for permission or waiting for you to make all the decisions when they should be doing it themselves. This has to change before January.

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, and today we're solving why your team treats you like they're human, Google or Chad g pt, if you will, because if this doesn't change before January, you're setting yourself up for another exhausting year.

Here's what we're covering today, why your team won't make decisions without you, and why that's actually your fault. The four stage ownership transfer model that gets you outta the weeds, how to document what's in your head so you stop being the human answer key.

And the exact conversation that can change everything.

So I'm working with a client, let's call her Mia. She has owned her [00:01:00] fashion brand for 12 years. She is freaking brilliant at what she does, and she is drowning every time it's market. She is reminding her team, make sure your hangers are lined up. Make sure your steamers are full of water.

Like basic stuff that they should know That at minimum should be on a checklist, right? She CC'd on every email. Her inbox is ridiculous. Her team managers aren't handling things. They're just escalating everything to her.

So she's the one Recalculating costs herself instead of having her team own it. She's the one balancing development, production design simultaneously because nobody's really holding those spaces. And when I asked her to grade herself on her performance as a leader, she said, B minus on a good day.

And that super sucks. Nobody wants to wake up like that, especially in a company that they started. She also said. I don't have time sometimes to step back and ask, okay, what needs to happen here? And in my head, I think that my team knows what needs to happen, but clearly sometimes they don't.

And here's the thing, it's December year end chaos, Q1 planning, trying to do a line 12 months in the future. Performance reviews, compensation reviews. She's still reminding people about hangers and steamers.

You hear what's happening here. She thinks they should already know this. Plus I don't have time to teach them. Plus it's just faster if I do it. And so she does again and again and again. And you know what?

That creates? It creates a team that waits for her because why wouldn't they? She's gonna jump in anyway.

Real talk. Mia didn't delegate. She just added teaching people their jobs every day over and over and over again to her already.

Impossible workload. And I see this everywhere, founders who started something because they are excellent executors in their area of expertise. They can make big sales, they can sell big ideas, they can put together the killer spreadsheets, they can build the perfect decks. They write the tightest copy. So they launched their business, and then they kept doing all the nitty gritty stuff.

And this is not because you're a control freak. This is because the tactical work feels safer than the unknowns of leadership. You're in undiscovered territory. As you move higher in the development of your business, you've never been there before.

I mean, for sure it is easier to fix the spreadsheet than to have a hard conversation. It is easier to rewrite an email than to coach someone to become a more strategic thinker, and it is way easier to be the expert than to admit you don't have all the answers in your new role.

I feel you, but here's what nobody tells you.

When you hang onto the tactical work. You're not just hurting yourself. You're stealing the learning opportunity from your team, and you're also killing the future growth of your business. They'll never learn to own it. If you keep doing it for them, you're gonna have to endure the friction and the fuckups.

 So why does this happen?

Why do smart, capable people keep bringing you every decision? Because you never actually transferred ownership. You just transferred tasks. And here's the difference. Task delegation sounds like. Can you handle the Q4 report? Ownership. Which is different.

Sounds like. You own quarterly reporting for your area. This includes deciding what metrics matter, how we present them, when I get to see them, and what story you're telling with the data. Can you see it one's a to do item and the others a responsibility. So let me ask you something. If your team member came to you right now and said, should I prioritize X or Y, could they predict what you'd say?

Do they have a pretty good guess as to what that answer would be? Do they understand your framework for how you make that call? Probably not if they're asking you, right? Because your decision making process still lives only in your head. You've got years of pattern recognition, values, priorities, strategic context that you have never articulated fully.

So when they're asking you, should I do X or Y, they're not being incompetent. They literally cannot see how you think. So. Back to Mia. She had a product development manager that she promoted a few years ago who was an intern. Great person, hardworking, but they weren't really showing up as a leader.

Their team questioned them. Standards dropped whenever Mia walked out of the room. They would batch up questions for two weeks instead of surfacing urgent issues immediately. And Mia was so frustrated because she thought, Why don't they just know this?

And here's what I told her. They can't know what you've never taught them. And just telling them something is not teaching them something. translation. You can't delegate ownership without documenting your thinking, not just thinking that it's transferred because somebody's hanging out with you or by osmosis.

The task list is just not enough. Listen, if you go back into January with this same dynamic, your year is toast. New year, same bottleneck. And what I wanna invite you to do is use the next three weeks to start this process. ' cause you're going through all of these reviews anyway, right? You're reviewing people's job descriptions, you're reviewing how well they did this year.

So dive in and reorient this process. here is how we fix this four stages and you cannot skip steps. I wish I could tell you that, but you can't. Number one document your thinking, not just your tasks. You need to get what's in your head into a format someone else can access.

And here's where AI can be your best friend. And I'm not kidding, this is a force multiplier. So with Mia, we literally walked through a tech fit process and use chat GPT to turn her verbal instructions into a checklist in real time. She's talking, AI is documenting and suddenly what lived in her head for 17 years is now a standard operating procedure that her team can follow.

And not just the tasks, but why she's saying what she's saying. Why do the hangers need to be straight? Why do the steamers need to be filled, right? So you can use this prompt to help you with this process. I make decisions about the area you make a decision about all the time. Help me identify the factors I consider the frameworks I use, the way that I think and the criteria that matter most, and then walk through it out loud.

You'll see patterns you didn't even know you had ways of thinking you didn't even know you thought. a real example. I had a client who couldn't figure out why her team kept bringing her pricing decisions. We extracted her framework. Turns out she was weighing six factors to create a price, the project scope, the client relationship history, strategic value, team capacity, profit margin, and competitive positioning.

That's a bunch of stuff that's all nested in that pricing decision. Conversation. Right. She'd never written it down. Her team was just guessing. Like the best that they were able to do when they were really on the ball was just compare her pricing to other competitors. But once we documented it, they could price projects without her and be reasonably, if not fully accurate with what she would've done.

All right. Stage two. Transfer context, the why behind the what. This is why you make your decisions and what the decisions are. So this is where you teach your people to think like you, not just do like you. With Mia, we created what I call the "done properly when" statements. 

She's got kids with A DHD. She knows. You can't just say to a kid with a DHD, clean your room and expect it to happen it, I promise you it will not happen. There's no way. But if you say your room is clean, when your bed is made, clothes are in the hamper and the floor is clear. Now they can see success and a pathway to get to it.

 Same thing at work. This season is done properly when we hit 75% line completion. Three weeks before market. All tech packs are approved and costing is finalized. Now her team isn't guessing what done looks like. They can see it and they can also create decision guides.

They could be AI powered, it could be a doc, but it needs to include what do you optimize for? Speed, quality, relationships, margin. What are your non-negotiables? What are common scenarios and how do you handle them and when do you escalate versus when do you decide?

So one of the things we did for a client that I think is really helpful is we created a, would Lena approve this GPT for her team?

We fed it. Her values. Her criteria, strategic priorities, the way that she thinks, and her team asks that GPT, when they're stuck, would this be approved? It reviews their work. It's not perfect, but it gives them 80% of what they need without interrupting her day.

Stage three of the four stages. You need to practice a little bit with safety nets. This is graduated ownership. You don't wanna go from zero autonomy to full autonomy overnight. Your, your heart will not handle that level of transition of trust.

So here's how you make the transition. You tell your team, you make the call. Then tell me what you decided and why. Not ask me first, not get my approval, make the call, then tell me. I know this might be like running ice water through your veins right now, but you need to watch their decision making in real time.

You can course correct if you need to, but this is how they start building the muscle of ownership, not just execution. here's what this looked like with Mia. Her product development manager would make the calls on fabric approvals, then brief her after I approved the silk option because it hit our price point and the hand feel matched the luxury positioning that we're needing for this collection.

So see the difference. They are no longer asking for permission. They're reporting their decision and showing their reasoning. And here's the genius part you can track these patterns over time to see the development in their thinking. Mia and her head of development started doing weekly recaps .

For instance, this month we hit 50% line completion three weeks before market. Next month are we at 60%. Let's see. Where are we improving? Where do we need help? They start measuring progress, not perfection, and she can see where her team is building ownership and where they still need support. Okay, stage four, full ownership.

And strategic check-ins. This is the promised land. They make the call. They tell you after you review the patterns and not individual decisions. It takes time to get here. It takes time, like three months, six months, depending upon how complex the decision making process is. You have to have enough cycles of them going through a process and testing it and then making the decisions and then you helping them.

Course correct. So Mia described her biggest shift during this time. Like this. This is what she shared. I'm now able to break down what I do and realize, oh, that shouldn't be me. That should be somebody else on the team. And then I stop and I redirected. So not only has her team built confidence in the process, but she has built confidence in herself and the handoff.

 weekly check-ins, when you're following this framework sound like, what did you own this week? Are there any decisions that you wanna walk me through? Where are you still feeling uncertain? And this way you're not in their business anymore, you're reviewing their business.

It puts you in the mentorship coach and leader space, and just to be clear, you're leading, you're not babysitting, you're actually leading. this is the conversation that can help make this stick. And it's the hard part. You actually have to say this out loud.

I gave Mia this exact phrase to use with her product development manager. And when they showed up unprepared for the third time, dude, what's the deal? That's it. Not passive, not aggressive, just direct. And then this, I hired you to own product development. That means you make the calls. I'm here as your thought partner when you need one, but I'm not the decision maker anymore.

You are. I trust you to figure it out, make the call and then tell me what you decided. And if you mess up, we'll figure it out together. But I need you to step into this. Most leaders never say this. They hire people. They act surprised. When those people wait for permission, they complain about them incessantly.

They do the work themselves and the whole thing. Lather, rinse, repeats again. Your team isn't incompetent. They're reading the room, and if you keep making all the calls, they will keep letting you. It makes their jobs a lot easier. So just to see where you are in this process. Here are a few red flags that ownership hasn't actually transferred all the way.

 If they're still saying, what do you think? Instead of, here's what I decided. If you're still in the weeds of their projects, if they're asking you to review things, that should be final, and if you feel like you're still teaching them how to do their job every day. If you're seeing these, go back to stage one because you haven't documented your thinking clearly enough yet.

And one more thing. Sometimes the person just isn't the right fit. It's the right seat, but the wrong person in the seat. Mia has someone on her team who really wants to be promoted, wants to grow, but when Mia delegates work to her, she brings back the problem unsolved and looks at Mia like, I have no idea what you're talking about.

So here's what I told her to say. This is the work. You've done the part up to this moment, but the real work happens once we get here and we're fighting for the right outcome. It may take two times back, it may take five times back and forth. The goal isn't to get it right the first time and be perfect.

It's to be prepared What you're showing me is the first draft of what it is that we're doing, and if they can't do the work after that conversation, they're not your person. This may be a confronting conversation that we're having right now for you, is that you're coming to the realization that there's some work that you really need to do, but that there are some people that you've been keeping around for any number of reasons.

Mostly because they allow you to point fingers back at [00:15:00] them and say they're not doing their jobs because you're not quite doing yours. And I'm sorry to tell you that, but that's what my job is. So let's bring it home. You got three weeks before the new year. This starts now pick one area, document it, have the conversation.

Because if January 2nd looks like today, then nothing's changed. Your team won't make decisions because you never transferred ownership. Just tasks, your decision making process will still be invisible, so please make it visible. Here are the four stages. You document your thinking, you transfer context, you practice with safety nets, and then you transfer full ownership and and you can use AI as a scaling tool for getting what's in your head into their hands.

 And finally have the accountability conversation. Steal the words right out of this. Grab it from the transcript. So here's your action steps for the week. Pick one area where someone should be making decisions without you. Use AI to extract your decision making framework for that area and get really specific.

Create a "done properly when" statement so they know what success looks like. Have the conversation. You own this now, make the call, then tell me and then track it. Are they making the decisions or still asking permission?

 Here's what's possible. In three months, you're reviewing patterns instead of approving every decision or freaking doing it yourself.

Your team knows how to think like you. Even when you're not in the room. You're not everyone's human. Google anymore. You're actually leading. You have time to think. You have time to create a vision for the future, and that's when you build something that scales. That's when your business stops being entirely dependent on you for every tiny decision.

 Next week we're talking about December chaos, what to do when everything collides at once, and triage strategies for when your calendar looks like a crime scene. So I will see you then, but in the meantime. If this was helpful for you, come join us in the AI for Founders community on LinkedIn. This is where we talk about these things.

This is where we test drive AI prompts. We talk about different tools. You get to be kind of messy and sloppy with AI behind the scenes as a leader. So join us in the AI for Founders community on LinkedIn. You can find the link in the show notes, and until then, go forth and document.

I want your next year to be so much easier for you, and I want your team to flourish. All right, lovey, I'll see you next time.