Why Everything Keeps Coming Back to the Leader
How capable leaders accidentally train their teams to bring every decision back to them.
📅 September 22 at 11:00 AM ET
Maya is a VP of Operations at a growing healthcare services company. Her directors are smart and experienced, yet her calendar is filled with questions: Can I approve this? How should I respond? What would you do? Maya answers because it is faster, and because she usually knows the answer. Before long, she realizes something uncomfortable: her team is getting stronger at bringing her problems, while she is getting better at solving them. She wonders, "How did I become the person everyone needs in order to move?"
Leadership bottleneck.
- Every escalation is rewarded with a fast answer, so the team learns that bringing Maya the problem beats exercising judgment.
- Decision-making capacity concentrates in one person. She gets sharper at solving while the team de-skills at deciding.
- The constraint is not workload. It is a single point of dependency that throttles team performance.
What is a leadership bottleneck?
A leadership bottleneck happens when decisions, approvals, and progress depend too heavily on one leader, resulting in slower work progress and agility. Bottlenecks can emerge from individual habits, team dynamics, and organizational design.
The boomerang or bottleneck leader is rarely able to then manage their realm of responsibility or manage other stakeholder relationships (e.g. clients, board, executive leaders).
Stop Being the Fixer
How leaders can break the pattern of being the go-to problem solver and build more independent thinking in their teams.
Watch This VideoLearn more about leadership bottlenecks
Managers Account for 70% of Variance in Employee Engagement
Research on how much individual managers shape team outcomes and performance.
Center for Creative LeadershipDelegating: Beyond Getting It Off Your Desk
Why effective delegation is about developing others, not just offloading tasks.
Harvard Business ReviewManagement Time: Who's Got the Monkey?
Oncken and Wass on how managers accumulate problems that belong to their direct reports.
Where do you see yourself or your team in these scenarios?
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