Natalie: Hey, welcome to this week’s episode all about do you need a second brain?

Now, it’s not what you think it sounds. It’s actually a great strategic tool to give to your key team members.

So to all my CEO babes, all of you out there who are running teams, I want you to answer these questions. Do you feel like every single business decision has to go through you? Do you feel like your team comes to you for everything, even though you’ve probably got the processes and systems, but you stall? You’re the bottleneck, the firefighter, the chief of everything, all at once officer. If that’s you, then this podcast is for you today. And these little Slaps of Nat series is back.

So I want to share with you how exhausting it is for someone who has a business team, right? And if they’re constantly coming to you, it’s actually a sign that your business ecosystem is out of. Out of whack. There’ll be a reason why they keep coming to you, and it can be that we’ve just disabled them to do that.

So today, I really want to show you how to protect your most valuable asset. And that actually isn’t your team. It’s your time and your energy, then your team. Because if we can protect those things, you’re going to have more time and more energy to keep empowering them and enabling them to do the work that they want to do.

So a few weeks ago, I had two lots of different. A GM and another person reach out to me from different businesses before they went to their boss, which is amazing, right?

So I can help women with their businesses, with their teams. So I coach the owners and then I can coach the key team players. So both of these women who came to me, they didn’t come to me to complain. They just came to me to troubleshoot. Like that second brain who wasn’t the business owner because there was a fire to put out. And because I’d said to her, business owners set the prerequisite that they need to step up and let them do it. Sometimes they do need that second brain.

So normally they would have gone straight to the owner, and that would have caused immediate stress, total derailment of the day. Because sometimes the business owner, that’s you, if you’re listening, you can actually bring more fire to the table, and that’s actually not what we want at that time.

So instead, with this particular general manager, we were able to troubleshoot the solution together. I could check in that she was okay. What was her solution? We got immediate ducks in a row. And then we stress tested that plan. And I think that’s really important is that we were empowering them before we went to the owner, which we did a few days later.

We didn’t want this owner to bring their fire. We wanted them to go, hey, we’ve already done the extinguishing. Here’s the plan. Are you happy for us to move through? So she put the immediate fire out and then was able to take the solution back to the owner. So the owner didn’t get to lose their momentum in their strategic plan that they’re trying to do. And I think that’s really, really important.

So the second scenario is that I had another team member reach out to talk through their ideas for 2026. Now they’re a marketing manager and we’d been coaching for a little while, so we did have a relationship and they wanted to do some high level thinking around how to troubleshoot some areas with the marketing, but also with some people that had to then go and execute her strategy. She wanted to do it before she hit her boss’s desk. She wanted to go in with just a different layer of understanding what her boss might need.

So that is the power of that second brain. So I acted as that second brain for her. Knowing the company and the boss’s way of doing business and the plan and kind of helped integrate, I suppose, like that bridge. And it can do a couple of things. It will empower the staff to solve the problem at a high level. So they won’t just solve it zoomed in here, but they’ll do it zoomed out, knowing the whole strategy for the year, for example.

And again it stops you from having to put out every single fire because you’re enabling your team to foresee potentially what fires and challenges and obstacles are coming. So you’re not the only one who can see things coming. And that creates that healthy business ecosystem where you’re not the one who has all the answers. It’s one where your team has a safe place to stress test their ideas, but also get them to help captain the ship and look for icebergs. I watched Titanic on the weekend and that’s just what made me think of that. Not the best analogy because the Titanic sunk because they didn’t see the icebergs. Anyway, whole different analogy.

But by getting your team to have a look and zoom out, it actually empowers them and protects you as the business owner.

So have a look at your slack or your inbox today and how many of the messages are things your team could have solved. And I think it’s something to really stop and think about. Because if they did have the right support or framework to follow, what would that look like for you?

Now I have a client who’s in the messy middle of trying to get her team to step up so she can step up and do some other things. But what can happen and it’s just, it’s about choosing your hard right. It’s hard being the chief of everything and then it’s hard to delegate to your team.

They’re both hard because your team, you know, for quite a while are not going to be. Are not going to do it as well as you. We know that hands down 100% guarantee that. But over time they will get it done and it will work. But we have to give it the room to do that. So they’re both hard solutions to the problem.

We know that you don’t even think doesn’t work because you’re tired, you’re burnt out, it’s overwhelming and sometimes you just want to burn the whole thing down. So choose your hard when you’re empowering your team again. You don’t have to do that by yourself. You can do that through some really clear communication, but also making sure that you have the support that you need.

So if you’re feeling like the bottleneck, you probably are the bottleneck, let’s just call it that. If you think then it is and I think just be okay with that. Just recognize that maybe you are the problem. I was going to say to my clients this year, I was going to give them a mug that said “hi, it’s me, I’m the problem”. And that’s where Second Brain can really help your team remove you and see what actually your team is capable of.

Something that in New Zealand that we do do a lot of is someone who’s technically been with, who’s technically good at the skill we employed them in. And if they’ve been with us a little while and we see some leadership qualities in them was we will promote them. Which is great. Right. I’m a huge fan of that.

But what can happen is if they’re not supported in leadership and management, then we’re then just moving the bottleneck back down to them. So from you to them. Which is why when you do appoint senior people or want them to step up, you have to ensure that they have that support and taught those new skills anyway.

Little slap around the chops for you in case you’re the bottleneck and you’re the firefighter. Get out there. Go and make something happen. Empower your team.