668 | Are You the Bottleneck You Keep Complaining About?

You say you don't have time to train, but you'll spend an hour tweaking that spreadsheet. You say the team keeps missing deadlines while every decision still has to go through you.

If everything slows down when it hits your desk, you're not leading. You're clogging the system. Today we are fixing that. All of that is coming up next.

Welcome to The Chris LoCurto Show, where we discuss leadership and life and discover that business is what you do, not who you are.

Welcome to the show, folks. I hope you're having a fabulous day wherever you are.

Today we are talking about one of the most common growth killers in small business, and that is control. And when I say most common, I mean most common.

It's funny how many times people will comment to me or somebody on the team. Man, Chris must have wrote that episode or that lesson or whatever specifically for me.

Nope. The reason I teach what I teach is because this is common stuff. So many people experience the things that you experience.

So the reason why it sounds like it's personally dialed in just for you is because there's thousands of other people dealing with the same stuff at the same time.

We recently had somebody who made a comment about a lesson that I wrote 10 years ago. I think they go somewhere around 10 years ago and they're like, hey, thanks for writing that lesson for us.

And they are new clients within the last year, year and a half. That shows you how much it's relatable. You're not the only, only one out there struggling with this. Tons of people are.

Tons of business owners and leaders are. So that's why we're working on this.

Thing you have to understand is when it comes to control being such a killer of growth, sometimes it's perfectionism, sometimes it's fear, Sometimes it's just the way you've always operated.

But it quietly turns into this leader bottleneck. By the end of the episode today, you'll know exactly how to spot where control is slowing your team down, what to delegate first, and the simple language to hand off decisions without losing quality.

Because a lot of leadership problems get solved the moment we get out of the way and build a team that can move forward without us.

Now, I know probably most of you can relate to the leader that hasn't taken a vacation in quite a long time or taken even a full day off in quite a long time.

I know a lot of business leaders and business owners, especially business owners, can struggle with all the things that have to happen.

And how much not being able to get out and about taking time off, spending time on themselves is such a pain in the butt is because there's too many things to get done.

There's so many things to get done. What's actually happening in these types of situations, usually it's because a leader is saying yes to everything.

They're saying yes to every good idea. They're saying yes to all the things that need to happen happen and the things that are going to fix everything and the things that are going to grow the business and the things that are going to be best.

And so, and so has this great idea and they tell me they can take it on and, and, and, and, and, and on top of that, many leaders don't delegate because they're afraid to.

They're afraid that the moment they delegate something's going to go wrong or there's going to be a problem. This is a common situation.

I know there were many times in my early leadership years that I'll get to vacation, I'll get the time off, I'll get to it now, considerably younger obviously. But eventually it took another leader telling me all this is going to be here when you get back.

Nothing's changing, you're just delaying the time. Now. I didn't know what I know now, which is as a young leader back then, 30 plus years ago, geez, that hurts to say that.

I didn't realize how much I was holding on to everything because I wanted to make everything great and fantastic and you know, solve things. I also had this, if it wasn't on my shoulders, it wasn't going to get done type of approach.

Well, that is something I quickly began to change and quickly began to realize I'm only affecting me in this and this is ridiculous. As I started to take time off or do things differently, I started to recognize how much I was bottlenecking my own system.

So it wasn't. I didn't own the company again. This was me leading for another business way, way back then, 30 plus years back in the early to mid-90s, I believe.

So here's what we're going to dive into today. Why leaders often don't recognize themselves as the bottleneck.

How fear and control sneak into just helping as I do my air quotes, the surprising cost of refusing to delegate and three steps to start clearing the path for your team, starting right now.

Your Calendar Doesn’t Lie (00:05:41)

So first thing you have to get to a place of recognizing. If you are using your calendar properly, then your calendar doesn't lie.

If you have a super busy schedule, then that's probably where the bottleneck is hiding now. Unless you have a team taking things on.

Probably, you know, 15 to 20 years ago, I had a ridiculously busy schedule, but I also had a phenomenal team that was taking on a lot of this stuff. Delegation was fantastic, team was operating really well, everything was going great, but I was still ridiculously busy.

There was so much going on. And you know what, in your 30s, even into, I think, yeah, when about when I hit 40, I think that's when I started going, huh? This is a lot.

You know, when you're younger, you can handle a lot. You can convince yourself that you can handle a lot. But what I'm telling you is if you plan and prepare properly, then you can actually put things in place where you don't have to be so busy.

So if you find yourself saying, listen, I don't have time to train someone, which is a constant, if you've ever thought that or said that you're one of 14 billion people, yes, I know there's not that many people, but that has done the same exact thing, right?

You will convince yourself you don't have time to train somebody to take something on because that is the easiest excuse, but you're going to spend 30 minutes color coding, you know, a project plan that you're working on or you know, something else.

So if you're willing to do that, then you might be the problem. Jeff Foxworthy piece right there.

You just might be the problem if you're the one who's spending all the time doing this thing instead of doing this thing. Right. It's ridiculous. We will spend time in areas that seem urgent, but they're actually not important.

When, if we would discover what is truly important to get done, we might scrap a bunch of those urgent, non important things, get those out of the way, focus on the important stuff so we can move things around and stop being the bottleneck.

So the truth is, time really isn't your issue. Discovering where you're spending all your time is not knowing, not auditing your calendar, not looking at the tasks that you do in a day, not looking at where you're spending your time, whether it's business or personal.

Are you, you know, coming home and, and, I don't know, spending the next three hours watching TV. Are you waking up in the morning and focusing on, I don't know, social media when you shouldn't be?

Whatever it is, are you taking a look at the amount of time that you have in a day? And please do not hear me say that you need to fill up every hour with business. That is not what I'm saying at all.

There are times for that. But the hustle culture needs to go. The concept where you spend the rest of your life, you know, working 16, 20 hours a day to try and make something happen is ridiculous.

It does not work. It can work out when you're super young, but I promise you, you will get very tired of that in the future. Doesn't mean that we don't hustle. Doesn't mean that we don't, you know, bust our butts while we're working.

But filling every hour of your day with business, I'm going to tell you that we'll get old very soon. What am I talking about? Prioritizing.

Prioritizing your day, taking a look and auditing your calendar, whether it's personal time or business time, and asking yourself this question. Where am I spending my time? What am I doing? And then make decisions.

Could I be doing something different? Should I be doing something different? Am I utilizing my calendar to the best of my abilities? Is Am I? And by the way, list out all the tasks that you are doing.

You'll be shocked. You'll be shocked at the things that you shouldn't be doing because somebody else should be doing those. List that out and take a hard look at it and ask yourself, is this what my day should look like?

And if the answer is yes, great. Rock on. But having done this teaching and guiding and coaching leaders and entrepreneurs for 30 years now, 30 plus years, I can tell you you aren't doing everything the way that you should do it.

Unless you've spent time doing what I'm telling you to do. Right now, you're probably bottlenecking your day, which means you're probably bottlenecking your team.

If you find yourself in meetings that your team can handle and should handle and should be empowered to handle and should be trained and taught to handle.

But you're in there being apart, running things, whatever. You're not leading. You're blocking your team. You're convincing yourself that you're leading, but you're not.

So start taking a look at where you're spending your time. How much time are you literally spending leading people to be better, helping people to be better?

Just because you're in a meeting doesn't mean that you're leading.

Just because you're, you know, know, having a conversation with somebody about something, unless it's specifically making them better, guiding them, directing them to being better, to solving, whatever, or helping them to solve.

I should say it that way. Then you're probably not leading when you audit your week. I cannot tell you how many leaders have come back to me when I said audit your week and tell me exactly how much time do you spend a day leading somebody?

I can't tell you how many times. The answer is five minutes. Why is it five minutes? Well, because I was doing this and I was doing this, and that was this and this.

And I did get this time to talk to so and so and help them out, but that was probably about five minutes. And then the rest of the day is filled with tasks and things and all kinds of stuff.

Well, then you have to start right there. What are all the things you're doing? Audit. What are you doing? Where are you spending your time? And then let's start to make some decisions.

“Helping” Isn’t Always Helpful (00:12:10)

Second thing you need to understand is that helping isn't always helpful. So let's talk at kind of like a sneaky form of control called rescuing. I know none of you ever do this.

None of you ever swoop in to fix your team's work. None of you ever swoop into to, you know, help them solve things, pick things up, run with it. None of you ever do that. I've never done that.

I've never been a rescuer. That is a lie. My early years, I was a rescuer. I am a fixer. Right? That's something I have had to change the way that I view fixing things. In my early days, I would fix it to make it right.

But I learned early on that I couldn't continue to grow people or a team and grow me if I fixed everything for them the way that I was fixing things.

I had to shift and, and realize it was my job to make them better and teach them how to fix things and teach them how to solve things and teach them how to dig in, go deep, discover why something's messed up, and even lead other people.

Help them to train their team to do things better. So rescuing doesn't actually empower your team. It disempowers them. It trains them not to think for themselves.

It trains them that they have to go to somebody else for solution. Or it trains them that they're not good enough.

The communication to a team member can be, you know, if you were good enough, I'd let you handle this, but you obviously aren't. That's why I'm jumping in.

You have to realize what you are communicating to your team. Progress means letting people stretch, even if it's not perfect.

Helping them to solve. Helping Them to learn, helping them to grow. It's not progress when you take over. It's not training and making people better when you take over.

And it doesn't mean that you just hand stuff over. That's a terrible idea. You don't just give everything to them and say, run with it, make it happen. You spend time training, teaching. Got it.

Well, Chris, don't forget, I don't have time to train because I spent 30 minutes color coding my plan.

Yeah, I got you. I understand. Once again. Once you audit that time, I bet you we can find you 30 minutes. I bet you can find 30 minutes pretty quickly.

So here's what I want you to do. I want you to resist that urge to rescue when you do. And now again, please listen to me. That doesn't mean hands off. It means instead of jumping in and doing the fix, all you.

And you being the one who rescues, teach, guide, direct, coach, enable, empower, right? Help them to solve. You'll be blown away when you do. That's true.

Leading people, that's when you know you're leading. Well, is when you're leading people to solve and you're helping them to solve on their own.

You Built the System That’s Failing You (00:15:14)

Next thing. It's highly possible that you built a system that's currently failing you. So here's the hard truth.

You may be leading a chaotic system that's driving you nuts, and it may be a system that you built. So if, for example, everybody needs your approval before moving forward, that's not a team issue.

That's a You issue. That's a structure issue. That's a bottleneck. That is a. I'm going to make everybody come to me because of whatever your reason is. I don't trust that they're going to do it right.

I don't want this thing to fail. I like being the one who solves whatever it is. Systems that rely on you are not, please hear me, are not scalable. What is scalable?

Empowering decision making at the level that it happens at. At. In, whatever, wherever the decision making needs to happen. That's what you need to empower.

But so many leaders actually create this bottleneck where people have to run so much stuff through them and then it slows everything down.

But it doesn't just stop there. You are stopping people from thinking for themselves. You are stopping people from solving for themselves.

Now, if you are doing this and it's just a, you know, I didn't realize I was doing this. And this I. Chris, I hear you. This is a bad idea. I need to fix this. Great, fantastic. Let's fix that.

But if everything inside of you is going, but if I don't, I'm not worth anything, or I'm not good enough, or I'm not needed, or, or, or then you have no clue the potential that you have.

You have no idea how much you're needed above where you currently are. And I know that's scary, and I know for a lot of people, they cannot envision that.

So you're listening to me, you're following me. Trust me on this. You're needed at higher levels than, than where you are right now.

And the sooner you get things off of your plate and allow your team to grow and allow them to become better, you will, by default, level up.

And you will discover there is more stuff for you to do better, bigger stuff for you to do where you are needed and holding yourself back because it's identity, it's worth, it's whatever is literally bottlenecking you as an individual.

Your career, your business, your team, and so on and so forth. So make sure that you're doing the best you can to build clarity into roles, responsibilities, everything, so that people can run without checking in every five minutes.

Have accountability. Make sure that you're putting accountability in place where you're coming along and making sure that people are doing it correctly.

But the amount of time spent on accountability, which, by the way, is an absolute must, you need accountability everywhere in your business.

But the amount of time you have to spend on accountability is a heck of a lot less than the time that you spend making everybody go through you.

Well, Chris, I thought that was accountability. Nope. That's a ridiculous bottleneck. That's a system that's failing you. That's a system that is built on the leader, not on team progress.

So if you want greater progress inside of your team and inside of your business, make your team better, focus on making them better. The sooner you do that, the sooner you get stuff off of your plate, the sooner you can start taking days off.

I can promise you, you could take vacations. But the sooner you empower your team to operate and allow yourself to level up, there is, I promise you, room above you for you to grow in.

I promise you are needed at a higher level. You just don't know it yet and you haven't experienced it yet.

Delegation Isn’t Dumping (00:19:28)

Next thing you need to know, and I could spend two hours talking about this to help you nail this down.

This is one of the most important things that we teach in our Killing the Leadership Crazy Cycle lesson.

Delegation is a Must. Now, delegation isn't dumping.

So let's kind of clear up a common fear that some leaders have, and that is that delegation isn't losing control, it's sharing ownership. It's helping others to become better.

So if you've ever handed off a task and then micromanage the living daylights out of the results, that's not delegation.

If you've ever, and everybody has done this, handed off a task, a problem, a project, whatever, and then, hey, did you get that done? Did you finish that yet? Did you get it done? You didn't?

Okay, let me just take that back then. That's. That's not delegation. That's control in disguise. True delegation includes responsibility. It includes support, it includes authority, it includes accountability, it includes proper training, it includes helping people to be better.

That's what true delegation is, setting people up for success. Now, you've heard me talk about other elements that must exist.

What is their capacity? You know, what does their day look like? Do they have the ability? Is there too many things on their plate? There's so many things that go into proper delegation.

But if you're not delegating properly, then that is probably the reason why so many things still sit on your plate.

That is probably the reason you're still the bottleneck of your team and your business, and you may just not have ever realized it. So understand that delegation done right multiplies your impact, not your anxiety.

Now, in the beginning phases, it'll probably multiply your anxiety. I could tell you when you start delegating properly, there's probably going to be a level anxiety that you have that's going to creep in, which it does.

Even if you're not doing it properly, there's probably a higher level of anxiety when you're not doing it right.

But the moment you do it right, the first time you delegate and you set somebody up for success and they're taking it on and they're running with it, and you made sure they had the capacity to do so.

And, you know, you may have gotten things off of their plate onto somebody else so that they can take on these bigger pieces or tasks or whatever is on your plate.

And the first time you do it right, you will be blown away. You will be like, I must do this every single. I have to do this all the time. I have to get stuff off of my plate.

I remember in the early 90s in my leadership career where I was like, I am literally holding myself back. I have phenomenal people that I could take stuff off of my plate, hand these on over to them and rock on.

And the moment I did, the moment I realized that, I realized there was so much more for me to do, I could see it. I could. Ever since I was young, I could see. I don't look at it like a ladder.

I look at it as opportunities. There's always greater opportunities you could put yourself in, but not if you're slammed with all the things that you're doing. The sooner you can help somebody else be successful, you then become.

And you've already done what they've done, you know, you've already done the thing that they're. You're delegating off.

Then you become more important to the team, to the business, to whatever, because now you have experience, skills, and the ability to take something else on.

So things to understand is that being the bottleneck doesn't make you a bad leader. You're not hearing me say you're terrible. You're such a bad leader because you've been the bottleneck.

That is not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is it's time for growth. And letting go of control opens the door to that growth, to consistency, to real transformation in your team.

Action Items (00:23:44)

So here's some things I want you to do this week.

The first thing, check out your weekly calendar. If you're using it, highlight three things in this week that you can change and that you can delegate and you can get off of your plate.

These do not have to be huge, right? This could just be three things that you train somebody specifically, you set them up for success.

You, you check in on them, you hold them accountable, but you get it off your plate. What does it look like now?

Don't dump it on somebody. Again, here's the dumping part. Dumping is when you put it on somebody who doesn't have the capacity to do it.

Whether it's intellect, whether it's time, whether it's skill set, whether it's the capacity of how many things are on their plate already.

You have to make sure that they have the capacity in all areas so that you can delegate it properly, right? So look at those three things.

Get those delegated properly. Second thing, ask your team, ask your team, where am I slowing you down? Where am I slowing the team down?

And allow them to respond honestly. Again, my caveat always is if you have the unhealthy person trying to take you down a notch, then you're probably going to, you know, strike their response.

But you probably have some really good people on your team that can be honest and can tell you, here's where I feel like you slow things down. So get in with your team and find that out.

Third thing, and you might even ask the question, where am I not empowering you? Right. How can I empower you more?

Do you know that some people are going to be like, make me the CEO, I got this. You know, there's probably going to be some people who feel like they could take on 10 times the amount of stuff that they're doing.

Take that with a grain of salt. If they do give you good ideas, maybe start empowering them in those areas.

If they're like, hey, I can take on so much more. Well, you need to really evaluate their capacity because many times that's people pleasing. I'm not saying it all the time. It is.

I'm just there's sometimes that people want you to be happy and so they want to take on a ton of stuff. So just make sure that they have the capacity.

Third thing, clarify decision rights for each direct report you have. So what am I saying by that? Take a look at every single person that reports directly to you and ask yourself what level of decision making should they be able to have?

What are you going to base that on? Their ability to make good decisions. People, if they can't make good decisions, what are we talking about? Right?

And it doesn't mean that everybody gets. This isn't an equal decision making opportunity.

If somebody isn't at the place to be able to make the same level of decisions as somebody else, then don't give them that level of decision making. Don't be ridiculous here. Right?

Take a look at their capacity, take a look at what they can have done, experienced decision making, examples in the past, everything. Evaluate the person and ask yourself this question.

How much decision making should I give them and can I train them up in it as well?

That's one of my favorite things to do, is to train people to make decisions for themselves, to think for themselves because then they can run, you know, they can make a lot of stuff happen. So those are things that you can do today.

Next-Level Leadership LIVE Event 2026 (00:27:13)

Now if you are ready to stop being the bottleneck in your business, the Next-Level Leadership LIVE Event is your next step.

You're going to learn how to create healthy skills systems, how to delegate with confidence and purpose and be successful at it and build a team that owns their own results, which is so needed.

It's not about doing more, it's about doing better through others.

So get your seat at chrislocurto.com/liveevents. One word. Live events.

That's chrislocurto.com/liveevents.

Folks, when you lead better, your whole business gets better. So let's make that happen.

As always, take all of this information. Change your leadership, change your business, change your life. And join us on the next episode.