Try this quick test. Open your inbox (email and Slack/Teams) and count how many messages are currently waiting for a yes from you. An approval, a sign-off, a “does this look OK?”, a decision only you can apparently make.
Now open your calendar and find the next genuinely free hour in which someone could actually get that yes.
That gap between the two? That’s how long your team has been stationary while feeling busy. And if you went off-grid for two weeks tomorrow and your honest prediction is “everything would stall”, then I’ve got some bad news for you: you don’t have a slow team. You have a you problem.
I know this one from personal experience and the evidence was in writing.
When I was running my own agency, ahead of a two-week holiday, I sat down to write my handover document. I was quite proud of it at first – thorough, organised, responsible. Then I noticed it had reached a little over seven pages. Pretty much all of those pages contained things that could not happen without me.
The sheer volume of things that were “going through me” was far, far too high. It spanned lots of different business functions too.
My handover was made up of a big list of things that I wanted my team to take over in my absence. But the fact that I could instruct them on what to do next within a few sentences told me something – why was I keeping hold of all of these things in the first place?
If it was possible to brief someone to cover for me, why was I waiting until a holiday for me to actually do that? Why was I keeping hold of everything the rest of the time?
I had become my team’s critical path. Not because the work required it. Because I had, one reasonable-sounding request at a time, built a system where everything flowed through me.
How nobody builds a bottleneck on purpose
Let’s start with the psychology, because this pattern doesn’t come from a character flaw. It comes from three very human things stacking on top of each other.
The first is that being needed feels good
Yes, be honest – it feels good to be needed.
Every approval request is a small confirmation that you matter. Someone can’t proceed without you – how important you must be. Nobody admits to enjoying this, but the pull is real and your identity gets tangled up in it fast. You don’t build a bottleneck in one decision. You build it one “just run it past me first” at a time and every single one of those felt reasonable when you said it.
Even if you don’t explicitly say “just run it past me first” and instead dive into a document, spreadsheet or presentation to add your feedback without being asked, you’re signalling your own importance to the work.
The second is an asymmetry of visibility
From your side, you’re responsive. You reply within a day. You never leave anyone hanging. But your team doesn’t experience your responsiveness. They experience your latency. A one-day turnaround, multiplied across every decision that routes through you, compounds into weeks of team-level drag over a quarter. You never see the compound effect, because from your position, each individual delay looks trivial. From theirs, it’s dragging on longer than needed.
The third is that nobody will tell you
Saying “you’re the bottleneck” to the person who writes your performance review sounds like an accusation, so people don’t say it. They adapt around you instead and just get on with it.
The feedback loop that would fix this is broken by the hierarchy itself. Which means you won’t be told. You have to notice.
(Yes, you hope that your team can be honest with you but the truth is that for most, you’re still their boss).
The warning signs you’re the constraint
The morning queue
Your first hour of every day is spent unblocking other people. And by lunchtime, the queue has been refilled. If this is your normal, you’ve become a service desk with a leadership title. The work of the team has reorganised itself around your availability.
“Waiting on [your name]”
Your name appears as a status. In the project tracker, in standup updates, in Slack threads: “waiting on Paddy”. When you are a column on the board, you are the constraint. It’s rarely said with resentment – it’s said the way people mention the weather. That’s what makes it easy to miss.
The pre-meeting swarm
People grab you at your desk, in corridors, in the two minutes before a meeting starts. This isn’t friendliness. It’s your team discovering that ambushing you opportunistically is faster than the official route to a decision. When the informal path to you is busier than the formal one, the formal one is broken – and you’re the blockage.
Approval inflation
Things arrive for your sign-off that you cannot remember asking to sign off. This happens because adding yourself to a process takes one sentence (“run it past me before it goes out”), while removing yourself takes a decision that nobody ever schedules. Approval lists only ever grow. Left alone, every process in your team will eventually route through you.
The holiday tell
You dread booking leave – not because of what you’ll miss, but because of what will pile up. Your first day back is spent digging into what you missed. And your handover documents are getting longer every year – this was a big telltale sign for me, as mentioned earlier.
Five ways to get out of the way
1. Run a decision audit
For the next two weeks, keep a running list of every decision that comes to you. Don’t change anything yet – just log them. At the end, sort the list into two piles: “only I could have made this” and “someone else could have, with the right authority”.
If your experience is anything like mine, the second pile will be much larger. That pile is your work plan for the next month. You’ve essentially written the holiday handover document without booking the holiday – which, as it turns out, is the entire exercise.
2. Set default-to-yes thresholds
Most decisions that reach you are reversible. They’re two-way doors being treated like one-way ones. So make reversibility the test and publish thresholds below which people simply don’t need you: “Anything under £X, anything affecting only our team, anything we can undo within a day – that’s yours. Don’t ask. Decide.”
The threshold does something subtle: it removes the ambiguity that drives things to you. Most people don’t check with you because they can’t decide. They check with you because they’re not sure they’re allowed to make the call on their own.
3. Replace approval with visibility
For a whole category of decisions, you don’t actually need to approve. You need to know. Those are different things and conflating them is where most bottlenecks live.
So change the instruction from “check with me first” to “tell me after”. You keep the awareness. They keep the momentum. If something’s genuinely wrong, you’ll see it in the update and can course-correct – which will happen far less often than your anxiety predicts.
4. Publish your decision rules
Here’s the thing my handover document taught me: everything in it was writable. Every rule I applied, every “it depends” – I could articulate all of it when forced to by a holiday handover document. Which raises an awkward question: if the rules fit on a page, why had the decisions been coming through me?
Because the rules lived only in my head. Your judgement is a black box to your team, and the only interface to a black box is a queue. So write the rules down. “Here’s how I decide on discount requests. Here’s what makes me say no to a deadline extension. Here’s the three things I check before approving a proposal.” Once the rules are public, people can apply them without joining the queue and they’ll surprise you with how well they apply them.
5. Build your absence muscle while you’re present
Name deputies for your recurring decisions before you need them, and then – this is the important bit – practice using them while you’re still around. Route real decisions to them on ordinary weeks. Let the team learn who owns what when you’re not the answer.
Do this and two things happen. Your next holiday handover shrinks to a page (okay, maybe two). And, more uncomfortably but more importantly, you find out the team runs rather well without you in the middle of everything – which was always the actual goal. Your job was never to be the busiest junction in the network. It was to design a network that flows.
A caveat before the challenge, because I can hear the objection: none of this is abdication. You’re not removing yourself from the important decisions. You’re removing yourself from the path of the unimportant ones, so the important ones can actually find you and so you can do the work that only you can do.
So here’s this week’s challenge. Block 20 minutes and write the holiday handover document – without booking the holiday! Start listing everything that would need covering if you vanished for two weeks: every approval, every rule in your head, every “if X, then Y”. You won’t finish in 20 minutes. That’s rather the point.
Then pick one page of it, find the person who keeps asking and give it away: “You own this decision now. Keep me posted. Don’t keep me waiting.”
The best managers aren’t the ones everything depends on. They’re the ones who’ve made themselves safely unnecessary, one handed-over decision at a time.
