The Leadership Coach™

Bottleneck

Posted on 16. Jul, 2010 by Paul Andrew in Leadership, The Leadership Coach™

What if one person, one department, or one process was seriously limiting the impact of your whole organisation? What if growth wasn’t so much about turning up the water, as it was about getting the kink out of the hose? What if the pressure you felt was largely created by the significant difference between the levels of energy your team is bringing (input) and the results they are creating (output)?

In other words, what if you had a bottleneck?

You know you’ve got a bottleneck when every decision goes back to the “Bottleneck” (insert a name, department, or committee here). Team members hesitate to innovate, initiate or make any commitments without Bottleneck’s blessing. So Bottleneck is usually busier than everyone else. Bottleneck tends to have a love/hate relationship with their predicament – reveling in the power and prestige one day, and retreating from the pressure and politics the next.

There are many reasons why teams end up with these choke points in their organisational flow. It can be the result of controlling individuals in leadership roles who are reluctant to empower others for whatever reason. Sometimes it’s the result of a good intention to prevent catastrophe of some sort by ensuring “everything gets checked”. Poorly designed workflows can funnel everything through an under-resourced part of the organisation. In fact even talent can cause it – so the “numbers guy” or the “creative genius” can’t keep up with all the things they’re supposed to stay across.

Search and destroy. If you want big results from small changes then hunt down your bottlenecks. This is not a witch-hunt though and it’s not a blame game… it’s a ruthless analysis of where your choke points are and then eliminating them.

Change a workflow. Push decision-making power down the line. Add team members to a pivotal department to increase flow. Remove hoops to jump through or steps in the process. Make action more important than perfection in your culture (suggestion: read that again). Strip job roles back to what is core. Identify and abandon 20% of your current projects or products that create the least results. Simplify.

Would you allow me to be your leadership coach for a moment? If you were my client and we just had this conversation about bottlenecks I’d probably suggest you had some work to do before we talked again in two weeks. I might recommend you get away from the busyness of business for an hour or two and systematically think through your organisation to identify the bottlenecks. Then you’d develop specific solutions for getting each kink out of the hose and commit yourself to immediate action.

Sound like a huge return for a few hours spent. So, why don’t you?

Let me know what you discover, and add your comments below

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Tags: Culture, Focus, Leadership Development, Leadership Training, Priorities, Team Building, Time Management