How should an employee bring a plan to their boss so the boss only has to say yes or no?

Here's the message I want from my team, almost word for word:

"Hey TJ, the video you sent is 40 seconds. It's pretty good, but it's too long. My plan is to edit it down to 15 seconds. If you're good with it, just say yes. That way you are essentially taking my brain power away from this."

Why does this format work?

The hard part is already done. You've come up with what you think the best plan is, and you're just waiting for a yes or no. It treats the team member as a chief-of-staff type who decides, not an order taker, and it takes the thinking load off me.

What's the template?

Problem: [what you found, one sentence]
Plan: [what you're going to do about it]
Ask: If you're good with it, just say yes.

When should someone not ask at all?

When the goal is clear. My ad manager's goal is ads that drive newsletter signups. Our job is to make the best ad possible. When a client sends a 40-second UGC clip, the right move is to edit it down to what he thinks is the best possible ad, without coming to me to say it's too long.

Agency clients are slow. They're slow with Meta access, survey answers and video ideas. The team has to act on incomplete information. You should be prepared to do 90% of it without me: you have incomplete information, and you just figure it out.

How do I get reports without asking people to write them?

Have them talk. Instead of written reports, my ad manager turns on a meeting-note tool and goes through every Meta ad account out loud: what he sees, what he changed, what he wants to do and why it's fine, and how much a metric moved. The plan was to automate it within a month so any note about Meta ads gets formatted and emailed to me.

I want that deep dive on every Meta ad we're running, especially on Mondays, and accounts that look low get examined one by one.

This only works when the system underneath is clear. See why a VA team underdelivers.