GONE BEFORE THEY QUIT: THE BOTTLENECK FROM THE OTHER SIDE
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Years ago I took a senior role at a company. I did my diligence and so did they. I asked the questions you're supposed to ask about scope and authority and what the job actually was, they answered them well, and we both walked away convinced it was a fit. A few months in it was clear the job I thought I'd been hired for didn't exist. The person above me wasn't going to give up anything that mattered, and I don't think it was premeditated or even something they were conscious of. It just never happened. Every idea I brought came back with one of two answers, no, or go make it happen, said with no people, no budget, and no real interest in whether it happened. I spent my days executing somebody else's thinking and my nights wondering how we'd both missed it.
I didn't quit, not for a long time. It just isn't in me to throw my hands up, so I kept grinding. I kept bringing ideas, kept looking for the opening that would turn the job into the one I thought I'd signed up for, and kept giving it everything I had. That's the part worth paying attention to. From the outside nothing had changed. I was on the org chart, in the meetings, doing the work. Somewhere in there, without deciding anything, I was already gone.
There's a line I keep coming back to on this. People don't quit jobs they can't do, they quit jobs that won't let them do what they're good at. The quitting comes last. The leaving happens months earlier, quietly, and it's the part nobody in the building sees.
You've read the "you're bottleneck" article a dozen times, and I've written a couple myself. Every one was written from the owner's chair, about the owner's calendar and the owner's exhaustion. But what about the the other side of the equation? The cost of a leader who won't let go doesn't just land on the leader. It also lands on the two or three people under them who could still build something, and who are running out the clock.
A neighbor of mine works in his family's company. His father is at the top and has been for decades. Nothing moves unless it's pitched in a way that lets the father feel it was his idea, so he's gotten good at that. He is also, by his own account, working at maybe half of what he's capable of, and he knows exactly which half is going to waste. The company will probably be fine. It will also never be what it could have been, and the father will never know that, because the one person who could have told him figured out years ago it wasn't safe to.
Here's the version I want you to sit with, because it doesn't look like the problem. A client of mine bought a second company. He wants to build it. He's told me a dozen times he doesn't want to be the bottleneck at the first one, and I believe him. The people there who should be carrying the torch and leading the way still bring him everything. He never told them to. He just answered, for years, and answering is a habit on both sides. Now he can't put his full attention on the new thing, and the people at the old one are doing to him exactly what my old boss did to me, except this time it's the leader on the receiving end.
The bottleneck isn't a personality. It's a loop, and the people you'd swear are trapped by it are usually holding one end.
So here's the question, and you can probably answer it in a line. Who on your team came in to build something, and when was the last time you actually let them do it?
