Thirty seconds to train a bottleneck

Most weekends my youngest walks in and tells me what he wants to do. Draw, build, go outside, it does not really matter which. What comes next is always the same: he tells me to get his pencils, find his Duplo or put on his shoes.

I do not. He knows exactly where his things are and it would take him thirty seconds, but I am standing right there, and to him that is a perfectly good reason not to bother. So he waits, I wait a little longer, and eventually he gets up, fetches what he needs and is happily building something before I have finished my coffee.

Thirty seconds is also how long it took the CEO of a fast-growing energy scale-up to fix a problem that was not his to fix. I was sitting in his leadership meeting when someone from customer service knocked on the door because a customer could not see their usage data, a known issue that came up regularly. He opened his laptop, clicked through a few screens, fixed it, and we carried on with the meeting.

Nobody said anything, but everyone at that table learned something he never meant to teach them: when something goes wrong, bring it here.

That is how most founders end up as the bottleneck of their own company: through dozens of small fixes, made quickly and with the best intentions, often in front of the very people who should have made them. Nobody experiences those moments as decisions, so nobody notices what they add up to, which is a team that has learned that thinking is your job and doing is theirs. And from where they sit, that is a perfectly sensible thing to learn. If bringing it to you solves it in thirty seconds, why would they risk getting it wrong themselves?

You can probably find the result in your inbox this week. A brief your head of product finished on Thursday, sitting in a folder marked “draft, pending your review”, even though he has been writing these for two years and knows exactly what a good one looks like. The word draft is not about quality. It is about permission.

Before you think I have this figured out: I will happily outwait my son over a box of Duplo, but at home I am often the one who has tidied up before my wife has even had the chance. Right now, for a renovation, I had already ordered and arranged everything before she could even get started. In this case I do not mind, but I know it is one of my biggest pitfalls, and it is exactly the same thirty seconds.

So try two things this week. The next time someone walks in with a problem, ask “What do you think we should do?” and then stay quiet for a bit longer than feels comfortable. And look back at the decisions that landed on your desk this week, and sort them by how far their consequences reach rather than by how much money is involved. Whatever plays out this week or this month belongs to your team. You only need to be part of the ones that will still be felt six months from now.

Chapter 5 of The CEO Parent, Decision-Making That Multiplies, is about exactly where that line belongs and why most founders draw it in the wrong place. You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1919360433

If you catch yourself fixing something in thirty seconds this week that was not yours to fix, hit reply and tell me about it. I read every one.