Summary
If your business stalls without you, it’s time to delegate, empower your team, and focus on the big picture—stop being the bottleneck!
I don’t know about you, but I’m a fan of video games, and never cease to be amazed at the incredible landscapes and worlds, puzzles, and physical feats that game designers build to tell their stories and to challenge a player.
A game protagonist can be painted into a corner and have to fight their way out, they can be on an endlessly winding path to the summit of a mountain, fulfilling a quest step by step, building strength, learning and developing skills until they reach the top! What a thrill!!! But at other times, after all that effort they only find a plateau… where regardless of tactics, their character is tested and tried and yet not able to proceed to the next goal without rethinking their approach.
It’s not that different in business, and if you’re on an upward trajectory, the ever increasing challenges will, like in the game, steer you towards growth, and improvement, and yet will inevitably meet plateaus where a rethinking of your approach will be needed. One of the things that can lead to such a plateau is that there is a bottleneck restricting the growth… and maybe… just maybe, that bottleneck is you.
If you take a situation like this to your business coach, here are 5 questions they might ask to explore where you might be the one who is blocking the flow.
Is your team always waiting for approval to execute on their ideas?
One of the great benefits of growth is hiring and bringing in people whose expertise, skills, and knowledge complement and expand your capabilities. However if a team has to wait for you to approve features, tweaks, or experiments then they’re hamstrung and are not empowered to own their own decisions, and yes, even their mistakes. This leaves a huge missed opportunity for their (and your) capacity to expand.
To get past this, your mindset has to change, not to one focused on making the decisions, but instead to ensure that you’ve given your team both enough clarity around the vision, goals and direction of your product (or service), and have empowered them to operate within that vision.
Set clear priorities and let your team leaders run with it. Trust them. Your job isn’t to make every call—it’s to build a system that can scale without you.
Will your project (or product, or team) run without you?
Still neck deep in Jira tickets? Reviewing every PR? Troubleshooting bugs? Attending every meeting?
It’s tempting—especially if you’re technical—but it’s a trap. You’re not the team lead anymore. You’re the founder! If you’re struggling to keep your fingers in every pie you’re going to spread yourself too thin, and you’re really going to irritate your team!
Micromanagement can become a big problem in small business because it leaves a team feeling under appreciated for their capability and their input, and it leaves you harried and frazzled trying to stay on top of all the things.
Promote someone you trust. Let them take the wheel so you can focus on the big picture: hiring, growth, strategy, and vision.
Do staff/clients and/or customers always ask for you?
This one feels flattering… until it’s not.
If all the critical information lives in you, or you’ve built a place where even the clients are reliant on you specifically then you’re not only constraining your team from shining, you’re creating a critical dependency that, should the unthinkable happen could also mean significantly greater challenges for your business, should you for any reason become unavailable.
There’s no doubt, it feels great to be needed, but it also feels great to grow into sharing that feeling with others. There’s also significant gratification to be had in expanding from being the technician, to facilitating others to help this business you’ve built, grow. If you’re freed up from having to be available on the ground, you’ve got much more scope to clear the way for more productivity and you’ll unblock the bottleneck allowing much more work to flow through.
Invest trust in your team. Bring them into key meetings. Hand off ownership and show that it’s not just a one-person show.
Where is your focus?
Is your focus on building or scaling? This one’s a killer, and for some can actually mean totally rethinking what you’re about. As someone who started out running a one person agency and delivering for my clients, I hit that plateau after a number of years and had to make a crucial decision; did I want to keep being a technician? Or did I want to grow what I was building?
I chose the former, and the end result was that I folded up the business over time, and found a role in a company that allowed me to keep growing while keeping my hands on the tools. But that isn’t for everyone!
If you want to grow this business, consider if it’s time to trate in the technical hat, for the architect’s one and staffing with great technicians. In this space the role now is hiring, culture, fundraising, and growth—not pushing pixels or writing code.
Do you feel like you’re always putting out fires?
When you’re neck deep in all the day to day activities in your business you default to having to react to situations, to solve problems as they happen, managing issues on the fly. Operating this way means you don’t have the headspace to be proactive and prevent issues before they ever happen because you can’t keep your head high enough to be able to look at and plan for the future.
Reactive management is a really high pressure way to operate bringing with it a lot more stress. If you’re able to plan ahead you can introduce proactive, preventative measures that will reduce not just stress on the system but also stress on you!
This is a significant shift, so it takes some planning and strategy to implement such a change to your mindset, and by extension, the mindset of the company.
If you’re already thinking about implementing the strategies we’ve talked about earlier in this article, you’re part of the way there in creating that headspace to be able to become more proactive. At its core it’s about releasing your team to be able to execute the practice of the business while you drive its vision.
In Conclusion
If things slow down when you step away from the work, that’s a problem and while letting go isn’t easy— it’s necessary to create the space in your business for growth… If this hit close to home, try this:
Pick one thing to delegate this week. Just one. Then give your team the space to run with it.
They’ll surprise you—in the best possible way.
