The Bottleneck Nobody Warns You About

Hey, it's great to have you for another episode of the Craig Rochelle Leadership Podcast. Let's get to work. What I know about you as a leader is you wanna move faster. You wanna make more progress. You wanna make a bigger difference. And that's one of the reasons why you're an effective leader. Yep, you probably feel like something is always slowing you down. You might have good people. You have a clear mission. You have opportunities right in front of you. And yet, no matter how much you wanna move, it seems like decisions take too long. Progress feels harder than it should be. And momentum stalls at the worst possible times. Why does this happen in leadership? Well, chances are you likely have what I call a permission bottleneck, a permission bottleneck. The truth is almost every organization eventually develops a permission bottleneck. So the question isn't whether you have one or not. The question is, do you know where it is and what to do about it when you have one? And this is the hard part about a bottleneck. You ready for this? It's often closer to the leader than the leader realizes. Let's define it. And then let's talk about how to deal with it. What is a permission bottleneck?

A permission bottleneck exists whenever people who could move the mission forward are waiting for someone else's permission to do it. It's whenever someone wants to move, wants to decide, wants to make progress, but needs an approval from someone else and it slows the whole process down. And the problem is the longer that person waits or the longer their team waits, the slower the mission moves. And most leaders think this. They think about, well, who in our organization can say no, no, we don't do that. But that's actually the wrong question. No is easy. No is the default. Anyone can say no. The real question is, who has permission to say yes? So important. What I want you to do is ask yourself this about your leadership and your culture. Ask yourself, how deep into your organization are people empowered to say yes without having to ask permission first? How deep into the organization can someone just say, oh, that's a good idea. Let's do it without having to get approval. And that question really changes everything because when you think about it, most organizations are really structured around who can say no, no, we don't do that. No, we're not gonna do this here.

But the best organizations are built around how many people can say yes. Here's the reality. How deep yes goes into your organization, it actually reveals how much you trust your people. We'll say it this way. Where yes lives determines how fast your mission moves. I'm gonna say it again, wherever yes lives, wherever someone has the ability to say, oh, that's a good idea. Let's go for it. That determines how fast your mission moves. Wherever someone says no, that's where it slows, wherever they can say, yes, that's where it moves forward. Now, no leader ever wants to be the bottleneck. I know that I don't, but I often am the bottleneck. And so what happens is we end up with them all the time because we don't realize what we're doing is slow the mission. Most of us, the reality is we don't create bottlenecks because we want control. The reason we create bottlenecks is because we care. Now, we make control because we care, but we're not trying to control, we're trying to care, but because we care, we often control. And what do we care about? Well, what I know about you is you probably really care about your mission.

You probably care about quality and excellence. You really don't want people to make mistakes. So what we end up doing is we stay really close to the decisions. We build approval processes and create safeguards that often involve us. And for a season, this is effective. We make fewer mistakes, we have more excellence, but then what happens is over time and you've seen this. The moment your organization starts to grow and the team expands, things are different. And here's the principle. The thing that once protected the mission eventually begins to restrict it. Let me say it again and let this sink in. We create a policy, we have two signatures, we need my approval. The thing that once protected the mission eventually starts to restrict it and it's slow progress. And we've all been there, right? What protected a small mission starts to strangle a bigger one or one that needs to move faster. And the leader who finds him or herself, that's valuable and was started out with good motives as care, it slowly becomes a ceiling to moving forward. So let's dive into it and try to break it down. The permission bottleneck, it typically shows up in three different forms. You ready for them?

It's a person, a process, and a policy. Almost every time you got a bottleneck, there's gonna be some person, there's some process or there's some policy. Let's talk about 'em, we'll start with a person. And you've seen this, every initiative tends to wait for somewhere along the way one person's approval. Or every problem comes back to that one person who's just the problem. Or every decision needs that one person's approval or signature for the decision to move forward. And we tend to think when we have that person that that person's actually helping, the reality is a lot of times everyone else is waiting on that person that we think is helping. And every day the team waits and the mission waits and you end up waiting too. It's a person or it's a process. And this is the approval chain that adds steps without adding value. Steps are good, accountability is good, as long as it adds value. It could be three signatures for a decision or two eyes on it when one would be enough. It could be a committee for something before you're gonna give approval when this process really needs speed. It's a process that unintentionally over protects the mission and now it slows down the mission. So every one of these processes made sense

whenever someone created them, right? There's a problem so we create a process. It made sense then. But even though it made sense then, sometimes it stops making sense in the future. Eventually you look back and you have all these processes that made sense years ago, but then once the organization evolved, they actually stopped making sense, but no one ever stopped to change the process. This was true for us. For two decades, I would oversee these video message series promotions that we would do at our church. We'd have this kind of elaborate promotion and say, "Here's the next best of series that's coming up." And the process had like so many steps. It's hard to imagine. I would pitch the idea and then a team would sort of brainstorm titles and then after a while we would choose the title and then we would pitch the conceptual video idea and then they'd go and create a rough draft and we'd review the rough draft and then we'd give it feedback and then there'd be a second draft and then we'd test it more broadly and then we tweak it and then we review it again and then we'd approve it, okay? That's a problem and the problem was me.

Now our process is very different and it's way more effective. The process is this. I pitch the idea, the team, they write a brief, basically describing the direction, the emotion, the tone, the spiritual weight. I approve the brief or make suggestions on it. Once the brief is done, I'm done and then they do everything else without me. Guess what? They like it better. I like it better. The end product is better and the reason is because we took what was a process that was good at one time, stripped it of the unnecessary steps, delegated to the people that are better at making decisions and now the end product is better. So you've got a bottleneck, there's probably a person, there's probably a process or there's a policy and this phrase is not original to me, someone else said it, but what tends to happen is someone, somewhere, organizationally makes a mistake and someone makes a policy. They call it organizational scar tissue. Most policies are the result of something dumb somebody did. And then over time, what happens is the season changes because it always changes, but some policy or rule still exists even though it outlived its reason. And some policies, honestly, they've been in effect so long

in our organization, nobody remembers why they were there in the first place. But no one also has permission to question them either or at least we need to empower them to have permission to question them. And here's the problem. Every unnecessary approval is a tax on momentum. If it takes more time to approve, it slows down movement. And most of us, we rarely slow down to calculate the cost of bottlenecks. What happens is we see the symptoms and they're frustrating to us, but we don't identify the source. And so because there's all these bottlenecks slowing down progress, progress does slow profits drop. If you're in business, the mission stalls, if you're in ministry, and then it compounds. And this is the part Over time, what happens is the bottleneck doesn't just slow your organization, but it starts to select who stays in your organization. And let me unpack this and explain it. Why do your best people leave? Well, best people tend to leave quickly when they're frustrated because honestly, they have options, they can go somewhere else, they can move, a lot of people are gonna want them. And the complacent ones that don't have a lot of options, they tend to stay. And those are the people that are comfortable with slow.

So if progress starts to wane and we can't get things done here, and I'm a mover and a shaker, but things take too long, morale is gonna drop, and the whole organization and everybody in it's going to suffer. And then the good people say, "I'm not gonna stick around for this, I gotta go somewhere where I can get things done." And they actually do, and the people that are more honestly more comfortable, not pushing things, tend to stay, and then the mission starts to stall. And when the mission stalls, potential profit goes away, and real people that could have been reached won't eventually be reached. So this is not just an organizational problem, but it's a stewardship problem. It's not stewarding wisely the resources that we're trusted to use to make a difference. So what do you do? How do you know if you are the bottleneck? What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna ask you four questions, and you can ask yourself these questions. These questions are in the leader guide. If you are not getting the leader guide, go to cglp.com, stand for Craig Rochelle, leadership podcast, go to cglp.com, and just click on the button, we'll send you the leader guide with every single episode, amazing content for you. You can use it to teach your team, get the leader guide.

These four questions are in the leader guide. The first question is this. Do others work around me to get things done? If people are having to navigate around you to get things done, chances are you might be a bottleneck. Second question, am I calling it analysis when it's actually procrastination? I feel convicted by that question right now. I need a little more time, I need a little more time, but I'm doing it, I'm just stalling. Am I calling this analysis when it's actually procrastination? Question number three, ask yourself. Am I the last approval on things that shouldn't need my approval? Are they waiting on me when the truth of matter is I could trust them to get it done? If you answered yes to any of these, you've stopped leading and you're actually limiting, and so then I wanna ask the fourth one, and the fourth one is this. Why have I trained my team to wait? This is important, why? Why are you doing it? Because the why behind you being the bottleneck, that's the real issue. The why behind me being the bottleneck, that's the real issue. Because it's not that your team can't move without you, it's that somewhere along the way,

you've taught them to ask instead of act. You've trained them to look to you to ask for permission. Can we do this? Instead of training them that they are completely capable to do it on their own, and you've literally trained them somewhere along the way to need permission instead of living out and acting on permission. So you created a culture, we'll call it that, a culture of permission when you actually needed a culture of ownership. We don't want people who have to ask permission, want people who own the process and the result, and take the risk and celebrate the win. So I want you to stay with me until the very end, but I wanna give you the application there. But first of all, if this is helpful to you, I wanna sincerely ask that you would subscribe wherever you listen, like the place you're listening, leave a comment, share on social media. If you've never written a review before, would you do that for me? My word to you is I'm gonna do the very best I can to bring you content that is helpful to you, to help you get better in your leadership. And if you do that for me, it would be a massive gift and a blessing. I'm gonna work hard to add value to you. If you can subscribe, like it, comment, share it, that would be a gift to me.

On the first Thursday of next month, we're gonna talk about part two, and we're gonna talk about the bottleneck that's deeper in your organization. And we'll answer the question, where in your organization do decisions go to die? And we're gonna get practical about few things. Let me tell you what we're gonna talk about. We're gonna talk about how to push yes deeper into your organization, how do you get people down-line to be able to be empowered to say yes? We're gonna talk about how do you develop people who don't need your permission to move? How do you help them grow? And then we're gonna talk about how to build a culture where ownership replaces permission. Now, if some of what we talked about today felt a little bit uncomfortable to you, that's actually a good sign. It means that you care, And if you see someplace in your leadership where you recognize you're probably the bottleneck. Guess what? The good news is that means you can change it. You have the power to adjust any area of your leadership that is not most effective. And the good news is, and I promise you, you don't have to fix everything today. My assignment to you would be simply this,

like this week, find one decision, something that's stalling out on your desk. Something that someone outside of your office is waiting for you to approve. There's some assignment, some task, some decision that someone else should be making or doing. What I want you to do is I want you to hand it off, trust them with it, and see what happens. And here's the powerful principle. Is that one simple act is the beginning of breaking the bottleneck. The moment you take it off your desk into someone else's heart, you're beginning to break the bottleneck. And I want to tell you right now, you can do this. The people around you are capable. They're more capable than you realize. The more you trust them, the more they're going to grow, the more they grow, the more they get better, the more they get better, the more you move your mission forward, little by little, one decision by one little decision, you start to empower other people. And I want you to believe in yourself, you're capable of doing this. There's more in you. There's more in the people around you. You don't have to be the bottleneck. And when you break a bottleneck, guess what? Flow starts happening, movement starts happening, progress starts happening, growth starts happening.

And the great news is, and I promise you, it's really, really good news. When you trust other people, they do get better. You get better together. The team gets better. And guess what? We've said it before, and we're going to say it again. We know that everyone wins when the leader gets better. [MUSIC PLAYING] (upbeat music)