How to avoid being a bottleneck leader

If you’re doing an important job, you will end up being a bottleneck at some point. There is an art to disentangle yourself from doing things directly. This skill is hard to learn. So in this post, I go into detail on a lot of ways you can remove yourself from being a bottleneck.

Many leaders struggle to balance being involved, with the fact that you can’t do it all yourself. As your organization becomes larger and larger, you’ll be crushed by the amount of decisions and work that come your way. Your organization will suffer if you don’t learn these skills. These problems are quite common and natural. But it is an essential skill to learn as a leader.

The framing for this is that you want your organization to produce the outcomes you would produce yourself.

So what are these techniques for removing yourself as a bottleneck?

Use indicators to set up an alerting system

The first technique is to use what I call “indicators”. Indicators are metrics, but they’re metrics you’re using to guide your attention, rather than to assess or measure. This is one of my favorite ways to use metrics, because it doesn’t automatically produce the negative surprise results you get from a lot of metrics. You can use imperfect measurements as indicators, which gives you a much wider set of things you can monitor than with metrics.

You use indicators to set up an “alert system” for yourself. This allows you to preserve your valuable focus time for things that are most important. But it gives you awareness of when something might require your attention.

For example, you can use the number of Jira tickets, broken down by team, as an indicator. If the number is ever-increasing, that is a sign that the team is operating in a particular way. You may or may not think that is a problem, but if you’re wanting your team to keep their bug inventory low, it could be a way to trigger some conversations with your team.

Set up an information system for yourself

A lot of director and above leadership is really about setting up an information system for yourself. You’ll often find that leaders have less idea of what is going on than anyone, because they’re furthest from the work. A good information system can help you stay abreast of what you value in your organization.

Indicators are one part of that information system, but you should look for anything that gives you a signal on how things are going. I list a number of ways to set up your information system in my “advice for new directors” post, including demos, skip level 1-1s, and indicators. You can also set up reporting so that people are feeding you the information you need.

How do you set up this information system?

The way I usually go about setting up an information system is to list the things I care the most about. And then think about how I will get a signal on how well things are going. I might attend demos to see how the teams are doing, and how the work is progressing. I might try out the software weekly, to get a sense of how quality is doing. I might have my managers report on a few indicators I care about. There are a lot of ways to get at this information, but the important thing is that you’ll need it. Otherwise, you’ll find that you’re always harassing your direct reports to get information from them. And you’ll drive them nuts.

How does this remove you as a bottleneck? An information system allows you to step back from directly overseeing the work, but still be confident it is going well. It’s a tool for trusting and verifying at the same time.

Use the Ladder of Leadership to grow and evaluate your team

One of the best tools I’ve found for removing yourself as a bottleneck is the use of the Ladder of Leadership. This term was coined by David Marquet, the author of Turn the Ship Around (although this concept doesn’t appear in that book).

Here’s a slightly modified Ladder of Leadership. You start at the bottom, and try to work towards the top:

• I’ve been doing…
• I’ve done…
• I intend to…
• I request permission to…
• I recommend …
• I see or I think…
• Tell me what to do

At the bottom of the ladder, you have the least amount of autonomy and mastery. For any given task, a person at the bottom of the ladder will ask for direction. If they have slightly more autonomy, they might share their observations, or recommendations. And the more they own their area, the more they are able to act independently to solve problems.

This Ladder is domain-specific. You can have people that are at the bottom of the ladder with one thing and at the top of the ladder, with something else.

The magic of the Ladder of Leadership is that it specifies how to move people further up the Ladder. You always prompt people for the next level above where they are today. For example, if your subordinate says, “I’m not sure what to work on,” that is at the bottom of the ladder. They are saying, “tell me what to do.” What you want is for them to share their observations or thoughts. Your goal is to get them to start saying “I see” or “I think”. So, you might ask them, “what are you seeing nowadays that seems important?” Then you can hear what they say, and help them reason about what they should be working on. You still may end up telling them what to do, but you’re training them to get further up that Ladder.

Moving them up this Ladder helps them to be more effective leaders. It also helps you, because it gives them increasing levels of autonomy under you. This frees up more of your time.

The Ladder can also help you move people back from dangerous situations. You can move them down the ladder. The key is to assess how well it’s working. If people aren’t doing well at the “I’ve done” stage, for example, you should move them down to “I intend to”, and make sure you’re aligned with their approach.

The Ladder of Leadership can also be used to evaluate your organization. Where are the parts of your organization that are high on this ladder? What are the parts that are lower?

You also have to keep in mind your own part of this. You may be less comfortable letting someone be fully autonomous when you don’t understand their area. And you might be naturally inclined to be more involved in areas you understand better. Be wary of your part in this.

The Delegation Ladder of Leadership

I’ve developed another variant of the Ladder of Leadership, specifically focused on leaders who are delegating. This Ladder is less tested than the above, so let me know your experience using it. It looks like this:

• Someone has been doing it…
• Someone has done it…
• Someone is telling me their intention before doing it…
• Someone is requesting my permission before doing it…
• Someone recommends approaches before doing it…
• Someone is sharing how they think it should be done….
• You’re doing the work yourself

Again, you start from the lowest part of the ladder, and you want to empower your organization to go higher and higher on the ladder. So this is how you gradually increase your level of delegation. You start with something you’re doing directly, and your next step is to get them to think about how it should be done. You might say, “I would like your help with this. I’m trying to solve this problem. Can you walk me through how you think you might go about solving it?” You can decide based on how they describe it whether you think they are ready to do the work themself.

If you do start giving them parts of the work, you give them what you think they have the skills to take on.

As you give away work, you oversee it depending on how far up the ladder you go. If it’s towards the bottom, you’ll probably want to have them check in with you frequently. You might have them report on progress every few days, or talk through how it’s going with you. The more you’ve developed trust in the person, and can delegate to them, the more you can step back and give them meatier problems.

The reason I think this is important is that many leaders struggle with delegation because they don’t feel like they can give it away because they have to give up control for how well the work is done. But when you see it as a continuum, you can do it in smaller ways, and gradually develop trust in your team’s ability to take on the work you delegate. I think it helps both the leader and the subordinate to work better together.

Delegation removes you as a bottleneck in the leadership chain. And if you gradually build up trust with your team and delegate to a greater and greater extent, they will be fully owning their part of the work and not be blocked by you from getting things done.

Use Completed Staff Work to empower your team to make decisions

Another concept I’ve found useful is Completed Staff Work. This came out of the US military. Completed Staff Work is a standard you can apply to help you understand if any given management work is sufficient or not. The standard is: “can you present the work to your manager, and have them just give a thumbs up to approve it?” If you have answered any questions they might have, and made it clear it’s a good decision, then you’ve done enough management work, and you’ve done Completed Staff Work.

Completed Staff Work helped me become a better subordinate. I learned from it how to manage up better. When I read about Completed Staff Work, I realized I wasn’t giving my manager the information he needed to make decisions. I wasn’t completely owning my choices, and making it easy for my manager to make decisions.

Completed Staff Work gives your manager a chance to inspect your work and reasoning. And if you’ve done the work, they can just approve it.

There is a lot of nuance to Completed Staff Work, and if you’re not careful you can waste a lot of time with it. I’ve written an entire post on Completed Staff Work, and I recommend reading about it.

But it is a concept you can share with your team to help them do better management work. Doing so frees up your time, because your subordinates are doing better, more complete work before they present it to you. It reduces back and forth with them. And importantly, it trains them to better own their areas, so you can step back and stop being a bottleneck.

Use process to remove bottlenecks

Sometimes you can use process to replace work you’re doing directly. For example, let’s say you are the one that always approves certain changes to the product or to the website. You do this because you understand it best, and want to control the quality of it. And you know the results will be good if you oversee it.

In such a case, you could use a process to help guide people. You could make checklist that people could go down to make sure they’ve considered all of the things you think about. And if there is a set of things you think is dangerous, you can have them escalate to you for those things only. This allows the default case to not come to you, but still gives you involvement for things that are dangerous enough that you haven’t fully figured out how to hand it off yet.

The time you spend on these type of process improvements is almost always worth it, because your organization becomes unblocked, and there is less that has to come to you. That’s what you want.

Go from doing the work to inspecting the work

Another pattern I’ve seen is to move from doing the work directly to inspecting the results of the work. So another way of saying this is that you review people’s decisions rather than deciding yourself.

Let’s use an example of hiring. In a lot of startups, the founders are fully focused on hiring the right employees. They realize how crucial this is, and feel like if they’re not doing it, the right employees won’t get hired. But… the fact that you don’t trust your organization to hire is pointing out your actual problem.

One way you could handle this is to gradually move your position in the hiring process towards the end of the interview loop. As you gradually move further back in the interviews, ask yourself, “are we still making good decisions? Am I happy with the assessments? If not, you work on that until you are satisfied. Then you can gradually move even further back.

It’s not going to work for you to hire every person in the company. So gradually move from doing the work, to inspecting it.  This helps train your organization to produce the outcomes you’re looking for.

Focus on outcomes and constraints

One of the biggest mistakes bottleneck leaders make is to focus on activities.

This is natural. When you’re doing the work yourself, your evaluation of the situation naturally includes how it is done.

But when leaders are trying to remove themselves as bottlenecks, they’ll often dictate the activities, and delegate them to their subordinates.

This is harmful for a number of reasons:

1. The person doesn’t feel ownership of the work. Why? Because they aren’t really grappling with the problem space. So they’re just operating as a remote controlled version of you.
2. You’re not setting up the work for real delegation. Why? You’re operating at too granular a level. This drags you into the weeds, and keeps you in a position of being a bottleneck.

What you want to work towards (assuming your subordinate has the capacity to take on the work) is giving people a few things when you delegate:

1. The outcome you’re wanting to see.
2. Some constraints to guide their decision-making.
3. The next steps for synchronizing your thinking or inspecting the work, or making sure you’re on the same page.

When you are a bottleneck, you should aim to give your subordinates Problems, not Solutions.

Use Tenets to give high level guidance

Another way to disentangle yourself from being a bottleneck is through the use of Tenets. Tenets are a way to give people mental shortcuts that help them reason about common problems within the company. If you see people making decisions repeatedly that follow a pattern that you’re not happy with, tenets can be a good solution.

I’ve written a whole post about Tenets. There is a lot of nuance to using them effectively. But the basic idea of a Tenet is that it is a rule of thumb. Ideally, a Tenet should be something where you could reverse it and it would still be a valid Tenet.

An example Tenet might be: “we are frugal with the company’s money, and take extra time to reduce costs”. An opposite Tenet might be, “We are willing to spend money to make us go faster”. With each of these, there is nuance, and you often provide more detail. But the high level Tenet becomes something people remember, and it helps them make decisions in their daily job.

If you don’t use Tenets, people will decide based on what they think is best, and what they think is expected of them. Tenets provide explicit guidance on what to do in these type of situations.

Tenets are useful to leaders because you shape the decision-making for a large group of people, and don’t have to be involved in correcting for decisions that are made outside the direction you desire.  

Use ‘I Intend To’ and have a default towards action

In Turn the Ship Around, David Marquet emphasizes using “I intend to” as a standard practice for all employees. He recommends spreading a culture where everyone in the company says the course of action they plan to take as a regular part of their work. He pioneered this on a nuclear sub. There, a sailor would say, “I’m going to do this”, and the person they said it to would say, “Got it. You’re going to do that.”

This is quite useful when your work coordinates with others. When people say I intend to do X, it does a number of things:

1. It helps people know what’s going on. So you can coordinate with that person.
2. It gives people a chance to intervene, if there would be bad consequences.
3. There’s a default to action. Instead of requiring permission, when you say “I intend to” you’re saying something will happen unless anyone does something.

So you can train your team to broadcast “I intend to” language, and that can often require less intervention and decision-making from you. For example, one of your managers might say, “hey everyone, I wrote up a plan for how we’re going to roll out this new feature. I’d love your input and improvements. Absent any changes or feedback that affects the plan, I intend to move forward on Friday.”

Notice how if nobody weighs in, the plan is approved by default. But they’re inviting input, critique, feedback, and possible intervention.

“I intend to” is a wonderful model of operating. So I recommend sharing it with your team, and modeling it yourself. It removes you from being a bottleneck, but also improves the way your team coordinates with each other.

Create real teams so communication doesn’t always go through you

The final thing I want to mention is that I see a lot of leaders become hubs, where they work directly with their subordinates. If you are an information hub where everything’s coming through you, you are necessarily going to be a bottleneck.

The alternative to that is to get your team to work together on problems together. Instead of working through you, they work with each other. I talked about how to do this in my recent post on organizational work. You want a leadership team, not a group of individuals.

Did I miss anything?

I made this list of approached when I was writing down a list of advice for bottleneck leaders. What did I miss? Let me know!

Podcast on this topic

Decoding Leadership is my podcast on leadership. I cover this topic in these episodes:

Thank you

Image courtesy of Pixabay.