When clients insist on working with you personally, the bottleneck is rarely about your team’s ability. It is about two separate problems: your team needs your method translated into real training, and your clients need a clear, confident message that your team delivers the same standard you do. Lia walks through the exact moves to solve both sides, from codifying your secret sauce to publicly edifying your team members in front of clients. This episode is most useful for founders, consultants, agency owners, and service-based business leaders who are stuck as the face of every client relationship.
This episode is part of the Delegation, Bottleneck & Getting Out of the Weeds series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…every single hour, every single day that someone is sitting waiting, that’s costing you money.”
“…we want to talk with our teams around, okay, well, what is a good job here? What does success looks like? What does done look like?”
“…these three things are going to save you thousands of dollars a month and it’s going to remove you from being a bottleneck and is going to create a stronger sense of morale on your team.”
Episode highlights
The hidden cost of being the person everything runs through
A bottleneck happens when work cannot move forward without you. Your team needs a sign-off, a meeting, a response in Slack, and they are stuck until you show up. Lia makes the math plain: every hour a team member sits waiting is an hour you are paying for nothing. The fix is not working harder or being more involved. It is the opposite.
Two root causes show up most often. First, expectations were never made clear, so team members keep looping back to ask if they are on the right track. Second, the owner or leader genuinely wants oversight but is too overloaded to actually provide it, so things pile up in the inbox and nothing moves.
Set crystal-clear expectations on what “done” looks like
The single most powerful thing you can do is define success before a project starts. What does a good job look like? What does the finished product need to include? Lia calls this setting clear expectations, and she returns to it constantly because it is the lever that unlocks everything else.
Pair the definition of done with an explicit check-in structure. You might say: let’s connect at the 50% mark, then again at final sign-off. Or: this is a high-stakes client, so I want a weekly touchpoint. Or: run with it and only bring me in at the end. Any of those agreements works. What matters is saying it upfront so no one is guessing, and your team members can move forward with confidence instead of asking “is this good?” every day.
If team members are still coming to you constantly despite clear expectations, Lia recommends digging into the why. Is it a confidence issue around the skill? Do they think you want to be making the decision? Are they afraid of making a mistake in front of you? Naming that out loud opens a trust-building conversation and often frees people to act on their own.
Delegate the oversight role, not just the task
If you need someone to be a checkpoint but you do not have the bandwidth to do it yourself, pick a team member to serve as project lead. They field questions, give feedback, and keep things moving. You are still informed without being the daily blocker.
This move has a bonus. It is a low-stakes way to test and build leadership skills in someone who wants to grow. They get real reps at mentoring and oversight. You get a preview of who is ready for a management role before you actually need one. Lia frames it as cultivating your bench, and it pays off well beyond the immediate project.
Build a backlog so no one sits idle
Even with great expectations and a strong project lead, there will be moments when someone is waiting. The answer is a queue. Every team member should know what is on deck so that when task one hits a hold, they pull task two without asking you what to do next.
You can make this even more powerful by setting a simple framework for prioritization. Something like: client questions always come first, then anything broken, then everything else in order of deadline. When people have a clear system for deciding what to work on, they stop sending the “what should I tackle next?” Slack that costs you fifteen minutes and costs them momentum.
What these three moves actually buy you
Clear expectations, delegated oversight, and a ready backlog work together. Team members feel autonomous. Work moves forward. You keep the oversight that matters without becoming the wall everything crashes into. The result is not just a faster team. It is higher morale, stronger ownership, and a culture where people feel confident enough to make decisions rather than waiting for permission.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 233: Why you’re still the point person for everything (and how to fix it). Being stuck as the final decision-maker on everything is almost never a delegation problem. Before delegation can work, three things have to be in place: the right people, clarity on where you as the owner should focus, and simple systems that reduce noise. This episode is most useful for business owners and team leads who have already hired and communicated expectations but are still buried in the weeds.
- Ep 231: Why delegating keeps failing (and the shift that actually fixes it). Delegation fails when leaders dispatch tasks instead of handing off outcomes, keeping themselves as the bottleneck at every step. The fix is shifting from fetch-the-answer assignments to giving a team member ownership of a full result, with clear context, defined success, and agreed checkpoints. This episode is especially useful for leaders who know they should delegate more but still find everything coming back to them.
- Ep 225: How to stop being the bottleneck on every decision your team makes. When your team brings every decision to you for final sign-off, you are doing two jobs at once and your team is never building real ownership. Lia’s fix is to articulate your own decision-making process, then deliberately offload specific decisions with a simple communication system so you stay informed without staying in the weeds. This episode is especially useful for founders and team leads whose capable people are still waiting on them before moving forward.
- Ep 221: Clients keep asking for you by name. How do you hand off work without losing their trust?. When clients insist on working with you personally, the bottleneck is rarely about your team’s ability. It is about two separate problems: your team needs your method translated into real training, and your clients need a clear, confident message that your team delivers the same standard you do. Lia walks through the exact moves to solve both sides, from codifying your secret sauce to publicly edifying your team members in front of clients. This episode is most useful for founders, consultants, agency owners, and service-based business leaders who are stuck as the face of every client relationship.
Want to go deeper?
The Unstoppable Team. How to build a team that runs without you in the room.
Full transcript (click to expand)
Another reason that we might become a bottleneck is we just are really overloaded. We want to approve something. It is important for us to have that final look. But we have so many things on our plates that we actually just don’t get to it. And what happens is, again, our team members, they’re waiting and they can’t be as productive as they could be, right? As the full potential would be. And every single hour, every single day that someone is sitting waiting, that’s costing you money.
Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast. I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my signature Ops Playbook, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech to save you time, money and stress. It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be, or a new manager looking to learn the ropes or a seasoned manager ready to up their game.
Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more. We leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it and everything in between. Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. Today, we’re going to talk about a surprising or maybe not so surprising place that is costing you thousands of dollars a month on your team and in your business. And that is you, my friend, being a bottleneck.
Now, what does it mean to be a bottleneck? Well, it means that we are the place where stuff gets stuck on our team. So team members feel like they have to send us, you know, something to approve to move forward with. We have to give a sign off. We have to maybe be in a meeting that has to happen in order for it to happen. And these kinds of things can cost a lot of money because it means our team members are waiting and not using their time productively.
Now, I see this show up a lot for a number of reasons. First, we haven’t really figured out clear expectations as that leader. So we feel like we need to be there along the way to check in on stuff. Maybe we’re not sure what success looks like. We’re not sure what a good job is. We don’t really know how to handle this project, so we just want to tag along. But then our team members, again, they get stuck because they can’t progress things forward without us.
Another reason that we might become a bottleneck is we just are really overloaded. We want to approve something. It is important for us to have that final look. But we have so many things on our plates that we actually just don’t get to it. And that creates a bottleneck because stuff gets stuck in our inbox or in our Slack or in our texts, or we’re overloaded with meetings. And we can’t prioritize the meeting that our team members are waiting for us on.
And what happens is, again, our team members may sit idly. They feel frustrated because they’re eager to keep going on a project. You know, we get satisfaction out of a sense of completion. So then they’re waiting and they can’t be as productive as they could be, right? As the full potential would be. And every single hour, every single day that someone is sitting waiting, that’s costing you money. So we really, really don’t want to be in this stuck place around being a bottleneck.
So I want to talk about a few ways that we can get things back on track humming along so that you can still have that oversight you want, but you are not slowing things down. Okay. So the first thing that we want to do is really make it clear, absolutely clear with our teams on what done looks like, what success looks like, because sometimes folks are checking in with us, thinking, is this good enough? Is this good enough?
Is this good enough? And that creates a ton of back and forth, which ends up pulling you into the weeds, even where maybe you didn’t want to be. Okay. And so now your time is being put towards this task. It didn’t need to be, and that’s going to cost you even more money. Okay. So at the start of a project, at the start of a new quarter, at the start of a new endeavor, at the start of a new service that you’re rolling out, whatever it looks like, we want to talk with our teams around, okay, well, what is a good job here?
What does success looks like? What does done look like? And then we want to be really clear on, well, what pieces of this need to be run by me to move forward? So you might say, Hey, let’s have a process that when you get about 50% of the way through this project, that’s where we check in. Or maybe you say, Hey, I want to check in and kind of get really clear on the approach you’re going to take, but then I don’t really need to see it till it’s a final sign off.
Or you might say, this is a really high stakes client. So I’m going to need to check in every week on this. Any of those options are fine. It’s just about saying it upfront so that everybody’s on the same page. And then if it’s something we wanted to look at weekly, we’re not worrying, Hey, wait, when is our team coming back with this? And we’re starting to check in daily. And if it’s something that we really didn’t need to see till that 90% final sign off, then our team member knows, Hey, move along with this.
You don’t have to come to me every day and ask me, is this good? Is this good? Is this good? So that’s the first thing really being clear. And that’s all about setting clear expectations. I know I talk about that a lot, and that is the key to someone feeling comfortable and confident that they can move something forward. So that’s going to prevent that sitting idly. That’s going to prevent the team members from asking, Hey, can you review this where you didn’t see that email?
And they actually could have totally moved forward with it without you looking at, right? So that’s our first thing. Second thing is if we need some kind of oversight, but we are overloaded, we don’t have capacity to be meeting about it all the time or answering questions, is that a responsibility we could delegate to somebody else on the team saying, Hey, for this project, Sarah is going to be the sort of leader on it and they’re going to be answering questions and they’re going to be that oversight.
So especially if you have a newer team member where you do want them to be checking in with someone regularly, but you don’t have the time, is there a manager within your company or team or someone that can take leadership there that could help mentor and coach this person and give them the support they need? And this is an awesome opportunity to really build up someone’s leadership skills that’s wanting to be a manager or wanting to take more on that.
They become almost a project lead and they can help give that feedback. So again, that removes you from being the bottleneck. You’re picking someone that maybe has a little bit more bandwidth. They have a little bit more time to spend with the person, and then they can help progress that task forward. So now you’re moving something forward. You’re also creating this leadership opportunity and you’re not making people feel stuck like they’re waiting for you. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been talking with a business owner or manager and they’ve said, I want to be a better manager.
I just don’t know the steps. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. And frankly, I’ve felt that way too. Even when I had been managing people for a while because this stuff is hard and it changes all the time. So the last time someone asked me for the steps, I made a cheat sheet. Head to LeahGarvin.com slash scorecard for 20 things you can do this month to be a better manager. This is literally your tell me what to do and I’ll do it.
Steps to motivate your team and get better results. There’s no time like the present. Grab the scorecard right freaking out. LeahGarvin.com slash scorecard. The third thing, and this is so important. I talk about this when it comes to work tracking that we want to do is have a backlog of things that people can work on when they’re done. So if something needs to be run by you or if you have a project lead and that person’s busy, what is that queue of things that someone is pulling from every single day?
And we all should have a good sense of this for all of our jobs. We should know what is, you know, what’s the main thing we’re working on, but what’s number two and three so that we’re advancing multiple things down the field. Even, you know, when we’re waiting for a client to get back to us or waiting for someone to come in to have a service performed, whatever it is, we want to have a good sense of, well, what is the next few moves that we can be taking?
And this is something that we can help our team members map out. What is that sort of backlog look like? Again, you can have managers help with this. You can talk about, well, what are the criteria we decide to know what to work on next? So if you have a team where you don’t really know what the next task is going to be, you could say, okay, well, here’s the order of operations. Okay. Questions from clients.
Those are always number one or something that’s broken on our website or something. That’s always number one or a bug that we have to resolve, whatever sort of setting a framework for the way in which we decide what to work on next. That’s going to be really key in giving your team members autonomy to move forward with things when they have something done or they’re waiting and this prevents them from sitting idle. Okay. So the combination of these three things, setting super clear expectations on what is done, what success looks like and where you specifically need to check in.
And on this first one, I’m going to say it’s often less than we think and we can often give a little bit more runway to our team members, especially as we start to build trust. Because we want them to feel like they have autonomy to get something further along. And if your team members are coming to you all the time, asking you questions, it’s a good opportunity to check in both with yourself and with them and say, Hey, I want to make sure if, especially if you don’t feel like it’s necessary to be checking a little time, is that person, is there a confidence issue around the skill, around making decisions?
Does the person think that you actually want to be making the decision and you know, they think they’re doing you a favor by bringing you along? Does the person feel like that they don’t want to make a mistake in front of you? Stuff like that. So teasing it apart and saying, Hey, you know, I’m really happy for you to run with this thing. I do see you come in and ask me like, what do you need here?
Is it, you just want me to say, Hey, run with it. Do you feel like you want me to kind of talk about my thought process when I review something and give it approval, whatever that looks like because we do want to be making sure we’re unblocking our team members from making decisions. And this can be a really big trust building exercise with you and that team member to talk about, Hey, what is getting in their way from feeling confident to move it forward?
If it’s something around imposter feelings and feeling like they don’t want to make a mistake, that’s a really great place to share how you overcome that. Or again, what is your thought process of making decisions? And really encourage them to give it a try and to bring that growth mindset in and, or enlist the help of other team members. You know, second thing is delegating to that team leader manager I already talked about. This is such a great way to start cultivating leaders on your team, asking people for a project or a few months or whatever to help be that oversight.
And this gives them a little bit of a test period. Like is this person able to be a manager? Do they want to, do they like it? Do other people trust them? And this gives you a little bit of space to free up your time and it starts to help you cultivate that bench. And I think a lot of us when we are managing team members, this can happen unexpectedly. We need a manager, we’re thrown into a role where we get hired and we don’t have a ton of experience.
So we don’t have a lot of confidence with that. And doing this kind of thing as that leader, as that business owner of starting to train people in leadership skills around oversight and management, this is going to make sure that you have people ready to go when you do want to create some managers on your team. So it’s a win-win, it’s a bonus. And that last one, having that backlog of things to work through, whether it is in your task tracking system or that framework for how do we elevate something into the next priority that is going to help give people so much autonomy where they’re not coming and asking you like, what am I supposed to do next?
What am I supposed to do next? Because that kind of thing slows everybody down. And in that 15 minutes they’re waiting for you to answer that Slack or that two days to answer that email. That person might be working on the wrong thing. Or be kind of sitting and waiting. Both of those things are costing you thousands of dollars a month, right? So there it is. These three things are going to save you thousands of dollars a month and it’s going to remove you from being a bottleneck and is going to create a stronger sense of morale on your team because folks feel like they have autonomy over making decisions, over moving things forward, over completing things.
And it’s going to just create a stronger sense of ownership that, Hey, I know how to be successful on this team. Okay? So you’re going to want to do that. And if you have any questions about this, reach out, you can schedule an SOS call at legarver.com slash SOS. If you’ve tried some of these things and folks are not really picking up the ball and running with it, sometimes we do give folks the opportunity to lead a project or be a mentor and they don’t really seize the moment.
And that could be frustrating. And that came up actually in my recent manager Q and a that I did on zoom was a person said, well, I’ve given some of my team members opportunity to be more leaders and they’re kind of like, man, I’m good. Well, I have some specific strategies for what to do in that situation. I’d love to share with you. So if that’s coming up or anything else, schedule that SOS call at legarver.com slash SOS.
And these are forums where we meet together. We dive into the challenge wherever you’re feeling stuck and you come away with a clear action plan of immediate things you can do on your team. So maybe we role play that feedback conversation that you’re dreading. Maybe we talk about listing out a way to describe what are these clear expectations. Maybe we’re wrestling with like who the next hire is. You have to make all these things, bring it to the SOS call and we’ll get it solved.
See you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning into the managing made simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive. With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along with someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
How do I stop being a bottleneck in my business without losing oversight?
Start by defining what 'done' looks like before a project begins, and decide upfront exactly when you need to be involved. You might check in at the 50% mark, or only at final sign-off, depending on the stakes. When you are overloaded, delegate that oversight role to a trusted team member who can answer questions and keep things moving. Finally, give your team a backlog of prioritized tasks so they never sit idle waiting for you. You keep the visibility you need without becoming the reason everything slows down.
Why do team members keep asking me to approve everything even when they don't need to?
Usually it comes down to unclear expectations, not a problem with the person. They may not know what a good job looks like, so they check in constantly to be safe. They might also assume you want to be involved, or they fear making a mistake in front of you. Have a direct conversation to find out what is actually getting in their way. Share your decision-making process, tell them explicitly to run with it, and encourage a growth mindset. That conversation alone often removes the habit of unnecessary check-ins.
How much is it actually costing me to be a bottleneck?
Every hour a team member sits waiting for your approval or answer is an hour you are paying for without getting full productivity in return. If that delay stretches into days, and it often does when you are overloaded, the cost compounds fast across your whole team. Lia frames this as thousands of dollars a month, because the lost time, the missed momentum, and the frustration that lowers morale all hit your bottom line at once. The fix is not working harder; it is removing the system gaps that make people wait for you in the first place.
What should I do when a team member lacks confidence to make decisions on their own?
First, separate the possible causes. Is it a skill gap, a fear of making mistakes in front of you, or do they think you actually want to be the one deciding? Once you know the root cause, you can address it directly. Walk them through how you think when you review and approve something. Explicitly tell them you trust them to move forward. If imposter feelings are the issue, share how you handle uncertainty yourself. The goal is to unblock their confidence, not just tell them to be more confident.
How do I build leadership skills in my team while also fixing my bottleneck problem?
Delegate the oversight role for a project to someone on your team who wants to grow into management. They become the point person for questions, they give feedback, and they keep things moving while you stay free for higher-level work. This gives that person a real test of whether they enjoy leading and whether others trust them, and it gives you a bench of people ready to step up when you need a manager. It solves the bottleneck problem and builds your team's leadership capacity at the same time.