How do you stop being the bottleneck in your own company?
The owner becomes the bottleneck when they are the only place in the company where all the information comes together. It is not a question of delegation or trust in people. People do not make decisions because they lack what the owner has: an overview. The way out is to get information to the people who should make the decisions, rather than merely giving them more responsibility.
Why simply delegating does not work
I see this in almost every company. The owner appoints a manager, gives them authority and expects decision-making to pass to them. A month later, the manager is coming to the owner with the same questions as before.
The reason is not incompetence. The manager simply has no way to find out what the owner knows. The owner has four years of context in their head, morning phone calls, notes from meetings and an overview of what is happening across the company. None of it is recorded anywhere.
Delegating decisions without delegating information means delegating guesswork.
Four steps that work
1. List the decisions that end up with you. For one week, write down what people come to you about. You will end up with a list of twenty to fifty items. Owners are often surprised by how mundane they are.
2. For each one, write down what someone else would need to know to make the decision. Be specific. Not 'an overview of production', but 'the job status, material availability and production line capacity until the end of the week'.
3. Find out where that information is today. The answer is often 'in someone's head', 'in an email' or 'in Jindra's spreadsheet'. This is a map of your dependencies.
4. Make sure that person can access it before the decision is made. This is where technology finally comes in: specifically, the simplest technology capable of doing the job.
A test you can use to measure it
Go away for a week and turn off your phone. Do it as a measurement, not a gesture. When you return, list what stopped and why. Every item on that list is a specific point where the company depends on your presence.
I consider this list the most honest diagnostic exercise an owner can carry out alone and for free.
How this fits into the bigger picture
A company's dependence on its owner is the most common consequence of digital debt. When information has no reliable place where it originates, the only reliable place is the mind of the person who has heard all of it.
Your next step
The Digital Business Review maps exactly this: where decisions originate, who needs which information to make them and where that information is today.
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