You Might Be the Bottleneck

When every decision flows through you, work slows down.

"Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things."
-Peter Drucker

One decision can change your entire day.
You approve a project.
Five minutes later, another message comes in asking for clarification.
Then someone waits for you to review a draft before moving forward.
By lunchtime, everyone is busy, but nothing important has actually moved forward.

The issue isn’t effort.
It’s ownership.
If nobody owns the result, work keeps circling back to you.
Teams don’t move faster because of more reminders or status updates.
They move faster when responsibility is clear and success is measurable.

You want to protect quality, so you stay involved in every decision.
It feels responsible, but over time it trains people to pause instead of act.
Simple tasks stretch into days because everyone is checking upward before moving forward.

As Shopify grew, teams started spending more time in meetings and approval loops.
People were constantly preparing updates, waiting on decisions, and pulling managers into conversations that slowed execution.
Leadership realized the problem wasn’t that employees weren’t working hard.
Too many decisions were still flowing upward instead of being owned directly by the people doing the work.
So Shopify began cutting unnecessary meetings and pushed teams to make more decisions without waiting for extra layers of approval.
That gave employees more responsibility, reduced delays, and helped teams spend more time executing instead of waiting.

When responsibility is obvious, bottlenecks shrink naturally.
Decisions happen closer to the work, projects move faster, and your team spends less time waiting.

Action Step: Pick one delayed priority this week.
Assign one owner and one weekly metric tied to the outcome.
For the next five business days, avoid stepping in unless the owner asks for help or the metric starts moving in the wrong direction.

You don’t need a full reorganization to regain momentum.
Most teams improve when handoffs decrease and accountability becomes clearer.

Try this for one week and pay attention to where work starts flowing again.
The bottlenecks usually become obvious very quickly.