3 Actions to Prevent Being A Bottleneck

Even the best of us fall victim to this management & leadership trap:

Being the bottleneck.

And before I share 3 ways to help you scale yourself and avoid becoming a bottleneck for your people, I have an exciting announcement.  🥳

Last week's leadership retreat for women was so transformative that I've decided to offer it one more time.  If you had FOMO or your schedule didn't align, join us November 6th - 8th.  Already 2 spots have been claimed!  Details here.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming…

First, what’s important about scaling yourself?

Here’s my take:

Each team I lead, I have one primary goal:  make myself replaceable.

I want to develop my people so well that they have the capacity and capability to run the show.

When I do that, the business moves more quickly, and I have more bandwidth to take on other interesting work, challenges, or projects.

And it has to start with ensuring I’m not the one impeding progress.  

Let’s look at 3 things you can do:

1. Evaluate your workload

2. Identify appetites

3. Ask about energizing work

Evaluate Your Workload

There are two areas I like to look within:

• Calendar

• Tasks

Your calendar is likely more full than it needs to be.  Yeah, I said it.

There are likely meetings you’re in and don’t need to be.  There are meetings that could have been an email.

Suggestions to open up calendar bandwidth:

• Role clarity - when you’re invited to a meeting, get clear on your role.  Are you there to be informed?  Are you the decision maker?  Did you get invited just because you tend to be invited to these things?  Consider if an FYI meeting is a better use of time than your competing priorities, and how else you can receive FYI info.

• Ask for an agenda - if the intent and desired outcome of the meeting isn’t stated, ask for the top objective and the desired decisions coming out of the meeting.

• Book before they can - each Thursday, I used to look ahead to Mon/Tues for open spots and I’d book them for the work I needed to do.  It was my way of driving my calendar while also being available with reasonable planning/notice.

Next, look at your tasks.  Break them out into these buckets:

• Things ONLY I can do

• Things I do because it’s faster

• Things I should be delegating

Now look at your list and put timelines to each of the tasks you know you should be delegating and the things you are jumping in because you’re feeling it’s faster than teaching someone else.  

When and how will you offload?

And now, start to think about who is hungry for what.

Identify Appetites

There are elements of your work that your people are hungry to learn about.

Ask them.

“What elements of my role are you curious to learn more about?”

“What components of my work might you have hunger to grow into?”

When you know what appetite they have for the work you do, delegation gets infinitely easier, getting you one step closer to not being the bottleneck.

Ask About Energizing Work

This is a drum I will beat until I retire.

It’s this: find ways to incrementally increase energizing work while simultaneously reducing or eliminating draining work.

Every 4-6 weeks I would find myself asking:

• What’s lighting you up about the work on your plate these days?  [Pause for answer] And what within THAT feels particularly energizing?

• What’s putting out your fire these days?  [Pause for answer] And what within THAT is especially draining?

AND…ask yourself these questions.

The more you align work with the folks who are energized by it, you’ll increase efficiency, opening up bandwidth.

–

That’s it for today!

Where might you be an inadvertent bottleneck?

Comment below and let me know your take away!