Here’s how to tell if you’ve become the bottleneck in your company — and three changes you need to make if you realize you are.
When my company, Teamflect, was just a startup, every decision ran through me, and that was a good thing.
We were small enough that I had context on almost everything: what a customer had asked for last quarter, why a feature was priced the way it was, what we had already tried on the website. A quick message to me was genuinely the fastest way for anyone to get an answer, so people sent them, and I answered fast.
One morning, I opened my laptop to four questions waiting from four different parts of the business. Sales wanted to know how much pricing flexibility we had on an enterprise deal. Product wanted a call on whether a customer request should move the roadmap. Marketing wanted approval before publishing, and customer success wanted to know if we could make an exception for one account.
None of them was a big decision. That is what made the problem so hard to see.
I worked through them one by one and felt useful, because from where I sat, I had just helped four teams move faster before 10 a.m.
Then I started paying attention to what had happened before I replied: nothing.
Work that was 95% finished would sit untouched because the last 5% needed a yes from me. The people waiting had more than enough experience to make those calls themselves.
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