A client of mine recently vented to me:
“If I hear, ‘Do you have a minute?’ one more time from my team, I’m going to lose it. Why can’t they make any decisions on their own?”
Sound familiar?
Over the years, I’ve seen this time and time again.
The founder starts off with lots of energy and ambition and they love the rush of solving problems … at first.
But they quickly move from being the one who makes everything happen to the one who is now the bottleneck.
They get frustrated because their team keeps coming to them for every little decision.
If they’re honest, though, they trained their team this way:
• they had an open-door policy that’s now a revolving door
• they have a history of second-guessing their team’s choices
• they’ve shown frustration when the team made decisions without them
Now they feel stuck.
Here’s the good news: it can get better.
Use the EOS® Accountability Chart to define who owns accountability for specific roles in the business.
Start with these three steps:
1. Determine the key functions of your business.
For example: Marketing & Sales, Operations, Finance.
Make sure they fit your business.
Identify a handful of key roles for each function.
What would someone need to be accountable in order to succeed in this function?
2. Start with the leadership team (your direct reports if you’re the founder), then build it out for the whole company before putting people’s names in the seats.
3. Now stress test it:
Think about those thousand little questions everyone asks you.
Do at least 80% of those questions land in a seat that isn’t yours?
If so, you’ve got a great start to your Accountability Chart.
Your team gains confidence.
You get your time back.
And the business grows without you needing to sign off on everything.
You can get back to dreaming big without being the bottleneck.
I’ve seen this transformation many times over the past few years helping entrepreneurial teams.
Sometimes fast.
Sometimes slow.
But it always happens…if they’re willing to let go of the vine.
Tired of hearing “Do you have a minute?”