In many organizations, despite hiring talented people, providing competitive compensation, and investing in the latest tools, progress can still stall. Projects that should take two weeks stretch into two months. Decisions get trapped in unseen bottlenecks. Teams work hard and put in the hours, yet the expected momentum and results remain out of reach.
When you look for the culprit, it’s easy to blame the market, the technology, or even the work ethic of the new generation. But if you are brave enough to look in the mirror, you might find the real source of the friction.
The hard truth is that in many growing companies, the CEO is the single biggest constraint on speed.
It’s rarely intentional. Most leaders are desperate for their teams to move faster. But the very habits that made you a successful founder, your attention to detail, your deep involvement, your ability to solve any problem, are often the exact behaviors that are now putting the brakes on your organization.
Here is how you might be accidentally slowing down your own team, and more importantly, how to get out of the way.
The “Let Me Just Take a Quick Look” Trap
You care about quality. That is a good thing. But when “caring about quality” turns into “I need to review everything before it goes out,” you have created a massive bottleneck.
Imagine your marketing manager finishes a campaign on Tuesday. They send it to you for a “quick look.” But you are in back-to-back meetings until Thursday. Then you have a travel day on Friday. By the time you finally review it on Monday morning, the campaign is nearly a week late.
Worse, your feedback is often minor, a word change here, a color tweak there.
The Impact:
Your team learns that nothing moves without your stamp of approval. They stop taking ownership of the final product because they know you’re going to change it anyway. They stop rushing to meet deadlines because they know the work will just sit in your inbox. You have trained them to be passive waiters rather than active drivers.
The Fix: Define the “Why” and the “What,” Not the “How”
Stop reviewing every output. Instead, set clear expectations upfront. Define what success looks like (the “What”) and why it matters (the “Why”). Then, give your team the authority to execute the “How.” If they miss the mark, use it as a coaching moment after the fact, rather than a gating mechanism before the fact.
The Problem Solver Paradox
You are a great problem solver. It’s probably your superpower. When an employee comes to you with a tough issue, your instinct is to solve it immediately. It feels efficient. It feels helpful.
But every time you solve a problem for your team, you steal an opportunity for them to grow.
If you answer every question, your team will never learn to find the answers themselves. You become the Google of your company. “Just ask the CEO” becomes the default strategy for every difficult situation. This creates a dependency that anchors the entire company’s speed to your personal bandwidth.
The Impact:
Your calendar fills up with “quick questions.” Your team becomes helpless without you. When you are away, progress halts. You are exhausted from doing everyone else’s thinking, and they are bored because they aren’t being challenged.
The Fix: The 1-3-1 Rule
Implement a simple rule for problem-solving. When someone brings you a problem, they must also bring:
- One clearly defined problem.
- Three viable solutions they have already considered.
- One recommendation for which solution is best.
Your job shifts from “solver” to “approver.” This forces your team to do the critical thinking before they ever walk into your office. Eventually, they will stop coming to you altogether because they realize they already have the answer.
The Fuzzy Vision Factor
Speed comes from certainty. When everyone knows exactly where they are going, they can run fast. When the destination is foggy, people slow down. They hesitate. They hedge their bets.
Many CEOs think they have been clear because they have a vision in their head. But unless that vision is documented, repeated, and operationalized, it’s just a daydream.
If your sales team thinks the priority is “profitability” and your product team thinks the priority is “market share,” they will constantly clash. Every cross-departmental decision will turn into a debate because they are optimizing for different goals.
The Impact:
The organization moves in fits and starts. Teams work at cross-purposes, wasting energy and resources. You find yourself constantly refereeing disputes between departments, re-explaining the strategy over and over again.
The Fix: Over-Communicate Clarity
Use a framework like the Vision/Traction Organizer (V/TO) or the One Page Road to get your vision out of your head and onto paper. Define your 5 -Year Target, your 3-Year Plan , and your 1-Year Plan, and then we will break the Annual Plan into 4 quarters to devise how we achieve the annual plan.
Then, become a Chief Reminding Officer. You cannot say it enough. Patrick Lencioni says that a leader hasn’t communicated clearly until their team can do a perfect impersonation of them. When your team can predict your decision before you make it, you have achieved true alignment.
The Meeting Mayhem
How many meetings are on your team’s calendar right now because you requested them?
CEOs often call meetings to “get a status update” or “brainstorm ideas.” While well-intentioned, these unstructured gatherings are productivity killers. They pull people out of deep work. They fragment the day.
Even worse are the meetings that start late, run long, and end without a clear decision. If you have 8 people in a one-hour meeting that accomplishes nothing, you haven’t wasted one hour; you have wasted an entire workday (8 hours).
The Impact:
Your high performers are frustrated because they spend their days talking about work instead of doing work. Decisions are deferred to “the next meeting.” The culture becomes one of activity rather than achievement.
The Fix: Structured Meeting Rhythms ( The Weekly Synch)
Adopt a strict meeting rhythm, like the Level 10 Meeting structure.
- Same time, same day, same agenda.
- Start on time, end on time.
- Focus on solving issues, not just reporting news.
Stop calling ad-hoc meetings. If it can wait until the weekly leadership meeting, put it on the issues list and solve it then. Give your team their calendars back.
Getting Out of the Way
Stepping back is scary. It feels like losing control. But the paradox of leadership is that to gain control over your company’s growth, you have to give up control over its daily operations.
Your job is not to row the boat. Your job is to steer the ship, chart the course, and ensure the crew has everything they need to row together.
If you want your team to move faster, stop checking their work, stop solving their problems, and stop interrupting their day. Give them clarity, give them authority, and then get out of their way.
You might be surprised at just how fast they can run.
Are you ready to stop being the bottleneck?
Equity Catapult helps CEOs and leadership teams identify the structural and behavioral habits that are slowing them down. We provide the tools and coaching to build a business that runs efficiently without your constant involvement. Contact us today to start scaling with speed.
