When They Ask You What to Do
A supplier who keeps asking you to make their decisions is handing you control of method, and the useful answers supply the inputs rather than the conclusion.
Reads as a businessReads as employmentCuts both waysDepends where you are
Four factors, and no total. Every bar is the same length: the side is the claim, the size is not. The heaviest factor in most tests, and the easiest one to give away by accident.
The supplier is asking you to decide, and you have to answer something
They ask which of two approaches to take
With an employee
Pick one, explain it, and expect it done
Available to you
Give them what they need to choose, and let them choose
The price: Slower, and you may get the approach you would not have picked
They ask what the priority is this week
With an employee
Set it, and reset it on Wednesday if something changes
Available to you
Say what the delivery is and when, and leave the ordering to them
The price: You lose the ability to reorder their week when your own priorities move
They ask whether something is good enough
With an employee
Tell them, and tell them what to change
Available to you
Judge it against the agreed standard and accept or reject it
The price: If the standard was never written down you have nothing to judge against and will end up directing
They ask you to resolve a problem in their own work
With an employee
Help, or hand it to somebody who can
Available to you
Say it is theirs, and renegotiate scope if it is genuinely yours
The price: It takes longer, they may charge for it, and you watch a problem you could have solved
Four questions, and the available answer is worse in each one. Three of the four are also questions a good supplier should not be asking. One company's own practice, not a description of anybody else's.
A supplier who keeps asking you to make their decisions is handing you control of method, and answering in the obvious way accepts it. This is the most under-noticed route by which a buyer ends up directing work they meant to commission.
The practical issue in “When They Ask You What to Do” becomes clearer when expectations and evidence are visible to both sides. Used for time tracking with screenshots, open this practical Monitask resource can add time and project context, provided the purpose is disclosed, access is limited and every consequential interpretation receives human review.
It is also the hardest to resist, because refusing to answer a direct question feels obstructive and unhelpful.
A broader benchmark for “When They Ask You What to Do” is available through HoneyBook independent-business resources. Use it alongside the brief and day-to-day facts so general guidance supports rather than replaces case-specific judgement.
The questions that are genuinely yours
Some are. What the business is trying to achieve, which of two outcomes matters more, whether a constraint is real, what the client will accept, whether to spend money.
Those are buyer decisions and ducking them produces bad work. A supplier asking them is doing exactly the right thing.
The questions that are not
Which approach, which tool, what order, how long to spend on a part of it, whether their own output is finished. Those sit with whoever is delivering, and that is the person you bought them from.
Answering them is not generosity. It transfers the judgement — and with it the responsibility for the result — back across the line.
Why suppliers ask anyway
Several reasons, and only one of them is a problem. They may be new and still learning what you expect. They may be covering themselves because the last decision they made was overruled. They may be genuinely stuck on something that depends on information only you have.
Or they may have worked out that asking is safer than deciding, because in this business deciding gets corrected and asking does not.
The answer that keeps it on their side
The useful move is almost always to supply the input rather than the conclusion:
Which of these two should I use? — Here is what it has to work with and what it will be judged on. Your call.
What should I prioritise? — The delivery on the ninth is what matters; how you sequence it is yours.
Is this good enough? — Against what we agreed, yes. Or: no, and here is the part of the specification it does not meet.
That third one only works if the specification exists, which is why it keeps appearing in this collection.
When you overrule, and what it does
Sometimes you will, and sometimes you should. A supplier about to spend three weeks on something you know will be thrown away deserves to be told.
Doing it occasionally, with the reason stated, is ordinary commercial dealing. Doing it routinely teaches the supplier not to decide, and after a few months you have an arrangement in which you make every call and they execute it, which is a different arrangement from the one you entered.
The supplier who never asks anything
The opposite failure, and more expensive. Silence for six weeks and then a delivery built on an assumption nobody checked.
The repair is in the brief and the milestones rather than in more contact: the questions that are genuinely yours should be answered before the work starts, and the milestones should surface wrong assumptions early enough to be cheap.
Training the asking out of an engagement
If you have inherited an arrangement where everything comes to you, it can be changed and it takes a few weeks. Say what you are doing and why, then answer the next several questions by handing back the inputs rather than the decision.
Expect it to feel slower at first and expect one decision to go a way you would not have chosen. That is the cost, and it is the same cost that appears everywhere in this collection.
Writing the inputs down once
Much of the asking disappears if the information a supplier needs to decide is written down at the start rather than extracted from you a question at a time.
What the work is for, who uses it, what matters more than what, what has already been tried, what is genuinely fixed. Half a page, written once, answers most of the next thirty questions and it answers them without anybody having to decide anything on the supplier's behalf.
Buyers resist this because it feels like a lot of effort for work that is about to start. It is the same effort, moved to the front and done once instead of twenty times.
The sign that it has gone too far
A useful check: could this supplier complete the next piece of work if you were unreachable for a fortnight?
If the honest answer is no, and the work itself does not require continuous input from you, then the dependence is a habit rather than a property of the job. That habit is yours as much as theirs, and it is costing you the judgement you are paying for.