Today, we’re going to talk about one person who is costing you thousands of dollars a month in your business…
You.
Does that surprise you? If you’re thinking, “Lia, that’s ridiculous,” just hang in with me—I promise you’ll get it in just a second.
What are you doing to cost yourself all that cash? Are you not doing enough? Do you need to work harder? Do you need to be more involved with the team’s work?
Actually, it’s exactly the opposite: you need to be less involved. Because when you’re too hands-on with your team’s projects, you might find yourself becoming a bottleneck in business.
What does it mean to be a bottleneck? Well, it means that we are the place where stuff gets stuck on our team.
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What is a Bottleneck in Business, and Why Does It Cost Us?
A bottleneck in business means that there is something—or someone—slowing down the progress and completion of projects or tasks.
In this case, that someone is you, my dear manager/business owner/team leader friend.
This happens because we haven’t set up a clear system for project approvals. This can result in team members feeling like they have to send us something every time they make a change for us to approve it before they keep going, or waiting on us to host a meeting to discuss it before they move forward, or for us to give an official sign-off every time it moves into a new stage…the list goes on and on. There are so many ways we can end up being a bottleneck in business without even meaning to.
These kinds of things can cost a lot of money, because it means our team members are sitting around waiting for us, twiddling their thumbs by no fault of their own, and are not able to utilize their time productively.
Every hour that someone is sitting and waiting instead of working is costing you extra money. So it’s important to figure out how to stop being a bottleneck in business…but first, we have to figure out why this is occurring. You can’t solve a problem before you know what the problem is!
Why Does This Happen?
People become a bottleneck in business for a number of reasons.
Firstly, it might be that we haven’t figured out clear expectations as a leader. When we haven’t gotten clear on what success looks like for a project, we might feel like we need to check in on stuff frequently throughout the process to ensure it aligns with our unspoken expectations.
But when that happens, our team members will end up getting stuck because they can’t progress things forward without us.
Another reason that we might become a bottleneck in business is if we are already overloaded with work, and we just can’t get around to approving all these things.
We want to approve it. We need to have that final look. But we have so many things on our plates already that we just don’t get to it, and that creates a bottleneck.
This isn’t only costing us money, either—it’s costing us team morale, because our team members will often end up frustrated.
It’s not like they want to be sitting around doing nothing—they’re often eager to keep going on a project. People get satisfaction out of a sense of completion, so when they’re stuck waiting and can’t be as productive as they could be, it can quickly drain their patience, their motivation, and their excitement for the project.
How to Break Open the Bottleneck
Let’s talk about a few ways that we can get things back on track.
Clear Benchmarks for Success
To stop making ourselves into a bottleneck in business, the first thing that we want to do is make sure our team members are absolutely clear on what done looks like—what success looks like.
If we don’t do this, folks end up checking in with us constantly to see if something is good enough, and that creates a ton of back and forth, which ends up pulling you into the weeds and shaping you into that bottleneck in business, even if you didn’t want to be there.
Clear Milestones for Check-Ins
To stop being a bottleneck in business, we also want to be really clear on which pieces of a project need to be run by us in order to move forward.
For example, you might say, “Let’s have a standing process where, once you get about 50% of the way through this project, that’s when you check in with me.” Or maybe, “Hey, I want to check in to get really clear on the approach you’re going to take with this, but then I don’t need to see it till it’s a final sign-off.” Or you might say, “This is a really high-stakes client, so I’m going to need to check in every week on this.”
Any of those options are fine. It’s just about saying it upfront so that everybody’s on the same page.
Delegate Away!
Next, if we’ve become a bottleneck in business, we want to be willing to delegate some of those approvals.
If we need a project to have some kind of oversight, but we’re overloaded, we want to see if that’s a responsibility we could delegate to somebody else on the team.
This applies especially if you have a newer team member where you do want them to be checking in with someone regularly, but you don’t have the time yourself. Is there a manager within your company or team or someone else that can take leadership there? Is there someone else that could help mentor and coach this person and give them the support they need?
This is actually an awesome opportunity to really build up someone’s leadership skills. If there’s someone who wants to be a manager or wants to take more responsibility, they can become a project lead, and they can help give that feedback you don’t have time to give.
Work Tracking Backlog
The last thing we can do to prevent a bottleneck in business is to have a backlog of tasks that people can work on when they’re done or waiting on approval.
So if something needs to be run by you, or if you have a project lead and that person’s busy, what is that queue of things that someone is pulling from every single day?
We always want to be clear about the main thing we’re working on, but if we want to prevent a bottleneck in business, we also want to be clear on priorities two and three so that we’re advancing multiple things down the field at all times.
This way, while something is sitting and waiting on approval, your team members don’t have to be sitting idle at the same time.
Some options are answering questions from clients, fixing something that’s broken on your website, a bug that you have to resolve, etcetera.
Got Questions? Trapped in a Bottleneck and Can’t Get Out? Send an SOS!
If you have any questions about this, please reach out! If you’ve tried some of these things and folks are not picking up the ball and running with it—for example, sometimes we do give folks the opportunity to lead a project or be a mentor and they don’t really seize the moment—I have some specific strategies you can use in that situation that I’d love to share with you.
So if that or anything else is coming up, schedule an SOS call with me. We’ll dive into the areas where you’re feeling stuck, and you’ll come away with a clear action plan of immediate things you can do with your team to get unstuck.
