Are You Being Collaborative or Waiting for Permission to Lead?

She sat across from me in our coaching session, frustrated with her team.

She’d been trying to get everyone aligned on a point-of-sale upgrade for weeks. Different people wanted different things. Nobody was moving with urgency.

I asked her: “Do you know which platform you want?”

She said yes.

“So what’s keeping you from making the purchase?”

 She paused for a long time.

“Because I want it to be collaborative.”

That answer is the whole episode.

This week, I share the story of Trish, a retail business owner who arrived at her coaching session with a team problem. By the time we were done, she understood she didn’t have a team problem at all. She had a decision she hadn’t claimed. And underneath that: a fear so familiar, so thoroughly hers, that she couldn’t see it anymore.

This episode names the pattern clearly: the difference between genuine collaboration — which needs the room, genuinely improves the outcome, and changes course based on what the team brings — and what I call accountability distribution, which looks identical from the outside but serves a completely different purpose. Both involve asking for input. Both produce meetings and conversations and feedback. The difference lives in one place: why you called the room.

I talk about why this pattern always sounds like a virtue. “I value collaboration.” “I want my team to feel heard.” “If I just decide, they’ll feel dismissed.” Every one of these is real. Every one of them is also what the broken playbook built its entire case on because it knew that the safest rules to give women who lead are the ones that feel like values from the inside.

In this episode:

• The difference between genuine collaboration and accountability distribution plus why they look identical from the outside
• The three phrases well-intentioned leaders use to justify keeping the decision open and what each one is actually protecting
• The test question: “Do I need their information, or do I need their permission?”
• What the broken playbook taught women who lead about using authority directly and why the fear underneath became invisible
• What happens when she makes the call and explains it clearly; and why it’s almost never what she expected

This week’s permission: Make the call because the decision was always yours to make. Explain your reasoning with care. Let your team do what they’re there to do. You don’t have to announce that anything has changed. You just have to decide.