48 Are you the linchpin or the bottleneck? Stop micromanaging to improve performance

Are you the linchpin on your team or have you quietly become the bottleneck?

In this episode of the Joyfully Unstoppable podcast, Becky Hamm unpacks a pattern many experienced women leaders recognize. You are trusted, capable, and relied on. That strength can pull you into every decision, every workflow, and every problem. Over time, it limits your capacity and holds your team back from operating at their full level.

This conversation walks through how these dynamics form, how they affect performance and promotability, and what it looks like to shift into more strategic leadership. Becky shares practical ways to distribute decision-making, build systems that scale, and create space for the work that actually moves your organization forward.

If your calendar is full and your team still depends on you for answers, this episode will give you a clear path to lead with greater clarity, confidence, and impact.

What you’ll learn:

• How being the “linchpin” can limit your growth and your team’s performance
• The hidden cost of becoming the decision bottleneck
• Why strong teams need distributed ownership and decision-making
• How to use messaging and visibility to reinforce team capability
• Practical ways to build SOPs that reduce dependency on you
• How to step back without lowering standards or performance

Listen, apply, and share
If this episode resonates, share it with a colleague who is carrying too much and ready to lead at a higher level.

#JoyfullyUnstoppable #podcastforwomen #womenwholead #leadershipdevelopment #executiveleadership #womensleadership #delegation #teamperformance #leadershipskills #productivityforleaders #leadershippodcast #worksmarter #strategicleadership

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Transcript

Becky 0:05

Welcome to Joyfully Unstoppable, the podcast for women who are ready to succeed without the stress. Whether you are leading a team, a classroom, a boardroom, or your own. Big, beautiful life. I am so glad you found us. I'm your host, Becky Hamm, leadership coach, speaker and founder of Women Lead. Well join me each week for straight Talk, practical tips and a dash of encouragement. Hello my friends. I hope you are having a great day. Quick question for you. Do you receive my weekly newsletter? Wait, Becky, what? You have a newsletter? Why? Yes, I do. It's called the Confidence Edit, and it comes out on Wednesdays. In it, I go into greater depth than what I can do in a 20 minute podcast. So I bring in some of the research, um, maybe expand a little bit on how to implement the sorts of things that we talk about in the podcast each week. And every once in a while, I will share something that's going on in my personal life. Subscribers receive early access to any new programs that are launching and sometimes get discounts too. If that sounds like something that would interest you, you can join@womenleadwell.net slash newsletter. Alright. Today we are going to explore the age old question. Are you the linchpin or the bottleneck? Maybe you're both, and I don't know if that's an age old question, but it's something that I see a lot in the beautiful, amazing women that I coach, is that they see themselves and their teams and their organizations see them as the linchpin. They're the ones that hold everything together. And at times because of that, they also then become a bottleneck. So what is a linchpin? What am I talking about there? The linchpin is the person who holds it all together. Things would fall apart if it weren't for that individual. You, if you're the linchpin, you or the person that people come to for answers. Even if the question is outside of your role, you are the person people come to, to untie a tangled up knot or a thorny little problem because they know you'll get it done. It's easy to come to you because you have all the institutional knowledge, because you have been doing it, um, holding things together because you take your job so seriously and you have invested yourself in your performance. And I wanna say this. We see that as commendable being the linchpin is a, a badge of something we carry with a badge of pride, right? We see it as, um, for a lot of us as an aspiration, we want to be indispensable. We see it as a testament to our dedication, to our excellence. And so I want you to hear me because I am saying this with love, but being the linchpin is actually super dysfunctional if you really are the person holding everything together. That is not good for you. It's not good for your wellbeing and my sweet friend. It is not good for your promotability. It is definitely not good for your organization. Why would I say that? Well, if you're truly indispensable, then you don't get to have a sick day. You don't get to actually unplug and take a vacation, and you are probably always available to put out fires and handle problems, and that ain't healthy. It's not good for you. And I recognize you might not care about your personal wellbeing, and so let's talk about your career. If everything depends on you, certain less than scrupulous bosses will think that you're too important in your current role to consider you for more senior roles or developmental opportunities. They just can't spare you. It's a career killer and. Being the linchpin is terrible for your team and your organization. Why? Because if you are the one holding it all together, people turn to you to solve problems. They should be able to solve themselves. They don't develop the problem solving, the decision making, the implementation skills they could develop if you didn't always show up to save the day. And while you are amazing and clearly have stellar judgment, it's actually a good thing for teams and organizations to incorporate a diversity of perspectives and approaches, especially in the rapidly changing environment that we face today day. Obviously, you're brilliant. Obviously your ideas are solid, but your team members hold brilliance too. And the reality is that you are simply more effective when you all have the chance to shine and when you intentionally bounce off of each other. But if you're the one everyone always goes to, if you were the default, then people aren't looping in the other brilliant members of your team or within the organization to get that renewal of ideas and new ways of thinking. That we know, that science, that data, that studies tell us improve outcomes. So while I know that there is a sense of validation to be seen as the linchpin, it is really not good. And if others, your boss, your team members, colleagues, if they use that kind of language to describe you, you should see that as a red flag. Now there's another red flag I want us to address today, and that is the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the person who's involved in every step of the workflow, and you know what I mean? Even minor decisions end up on your desk if you're a bottleneck. People check in with you before moving forward with execution, either because you've set the expectation that they have to, or because your team doesn't feel confident moving forward without your blessing. The bottleneck also comes when team members have to wait on you. To turn around items for them, right? And so that might be feedback on a draft. It might be like approval for a purchase or approval, um, to implement an action, any part of their workflow that routes through you, you then have become the bottleneck. And just like with the linchpin. Bottlenecks can develop because of your strong performance. I was talking to a member of the Women's Executive Leadership Lab recently, my membership program for senior executive women, and she mentioned that even though she's been very intentional to decentralize decision making, her team can still defer to her to make decisions that they are very capable of making themselves, and she has to remind them not to wait for her input before moving forward. She's not micromanaging, but her team just feels safer routing decisions through her. So, okay, Becky, so her team trusts her and respects her and values her opinion and wants her input. What could possibly be problematic about that? Well, let me tell you. One, when you are involved in everyone's workflow. That definitely means that you are doing work that you don't need to be doing. That's time and energy that you're putting to other people's tasks and deliverables that you could be putting to your own. Time and energy that you could be putting to those things that only you can do. Your team can make decisions about the implementation of a project, and if they can't DM me and let's talk, because that really is a problem, they should be able to do that. You focus on getting your team the resources and support they need for that project. You focus on eliminating any roadblocks that pop up that they can't resolve themselves. Not just that they don't, but that they can't. Right You Hulk smash the problems that are at your level and let them deal with the problems that are at their level. And you, my sweet friend, you are the one who is supposed to be focusing on what's coming up next. To put all that, in a nutshell, your job is to focus up, out and down the road and let your team focus on the team level work. Bottlenecks also are problematic. Because frankly, they stunt your team's growth. Just like with the linchpin, if you become the easy button for the team, then your team doesn't need to develop their judgment, their resilience, because they rely on you to give them the answer, right? Like we've discussed previously in episodes on delegation, that might be quicker in the moment. It might be faster to just come to you and you just give them the answer. But it costs you the valuable time and energy over the long haul, and it costs them the experience of figuring it out on their own so that they then become the ones with that resident judgment. That maturity of insight and when you build your team to have that judgment when it gets out of being just in your head, and when multiple team members have that ability, man, your team will be so much stronger. And better and perform at such a higher level. So what can you do if you find yourself functioning either as a linchpin or as the bottleneck? Well, lemme tell you, number one, you wanna become very intentional about your messaging. You wanna praise team members initiatives, even if things don't go the way that you would have done them. In meetings and over email, you wanna call out the valuable work that your team members are doing as well as you wanna highlight the impact that their work is having on strategic goals, on key initiatives. You wanna make it very clear and very public that there are other people who are crushing it too. There are other people who were figuring out the solutions to problems, who were moving the ball forward. Whatever metaphor happens to resonate in your organization. And you wanna make it clear that it is not just you, that the talent is diffuse and that other people can get it done too. And if somebody talks about you as being that linchpin or, or, gosh, this would all fall apart if you weren't here, or you can never retire. You can never leave. Then you wanna remind them of the valuable contributions that your teammates are making. And because you've now laid this habit, this pattern of calling that workout, it's not gonna feel like it's coming out of the blue. You have kind of laid the bricks, you have built the foundation for that conversation to happen. Number two. And I love this. I'm a huge fan. You wanna codify expectations and SOPs, standard operating procedures. I love me. Standard operating procedures. Why? Well, because they're systems, right? They take one-offs and they, they make them repeatable, and out of your brain so other people can do them. And so I would say you wanna start with the most critical tasks that you've got that live in your brain. And get them down on paper. And it doesn't have to literally be paper. What I love to do for this is voice to text into like a Google Doc, right? And then I can add links. If there are examples or um, PDFs or guidelines or um, regulatory requirement, like any of the stuff that I need to successfully complete the task, I can just dump it into that Google Doc and then you can share the Google Doc with everyone. If you don't use Google, if you're in teams, well, you can do that in teams as well or any kind of file sharing that you use in your organization. But hey, let me ask you this. Would you like me, like I've got SOP templates that I have used over the years, and it'd be pretty easy for me to just polish one up and put it out as a PDF. If you think that would be helpful if you maybe like the idea of an SOP, but it feels really daunting, you're not entirely sure. How to make it so it would actually work for you and not just be a goat rope, not just be extra, some extra thing that you would have to do. Shoot me a DM on Instagram I'm at at women lead well and let me know. I'm happy to do that if it would be supportive. My point with this, with the SOPs and the clear expectations is to take the implicit knowledge that you have in your brain. And make it repeatable. One and two, make it independent of you. Share the knowledge with the group. And you always wanna start with those tasks or processes that are the most time intensive for you. You might say you wanna start with the most critical, like the highest priority tasks, but I'm gonna say, man, let's, I really want you to be clearing your calendar. Clearing your to-do list, giving you time back so you can focus on the important work that only you can do. So I would start with what's the biggest time suck? Get those SOPs written. Get that shared with the group, and you will work through. From most time intensive to least time intensive, and you're gonna cover the priority tasks in there as well, right? It's not just a one and done. You kind of work through everything until it's all systematized. And I wanna, I wanna acknowledge, I wanna honor that this can be hard. I was working with a coaching client a few months ago who did this. She was the linchpin and because of their way their organization was, um, structured, she was also the bottleneck, and she's a freaking genius by every s. Every definition. And so people naturally relied on her for all kinds of stuff. That wasn't her work to do. And so together, through coaching, we worked on her creating the SOPs and coming up with scripts so that when people would come to her to just fix it, she could vary professionally and consistently put the work that was others to do, back on them to do it. And it took a lot of her willpower to not just step in and save the day. Shes a serious professional with a strong work ethic. She is actually literally a genius, and she knew that if she just didn't do it, that the execution would found her. It did for a time, but the team learned how to function. They figured it out. So the first month was rough for her to hold the line, and after a few weeks, the team said, well, we actually have to figure this stuff out. And hey, you know what? It isn't actually her job to be doing it. And so they started to figure it out. She didn't have to give them the answers. They learned to fish. They started to rely on the systems they had built not on her. And what does that mean? It means that she now has more bandwidth to wrestle with the big challenging decisions and obstacles that exist at her level of the organization. Okay. So last thing number three is that. Don't back down, and this is the hardest part. People you probably care about have learned to rely on you to do things and now you're gonna stop doing them. Some people really won't like it, but here's the cool part. Some people really will, you will see quickly who your go-getters are. They're the ones who are gonna step up and move forward without complaint. They are the ones who will grow and quickly become more capable because they were given the space. So for every person who complains about how you always did X before, why aren't you doing it now? Just remember the members of your team who are more proficient, more capable, and more confident because you let them step into their power, you let them grow, and as always, if you'd like help shaping these dynamics with your team. Let me know. I would love to offer you an hour on Zoom to work through your specific circumstances in your organization. Now, if today's episode spoke to you, I would love for you to share it with a friend who's had too much on her plate. We need more women leading from alignment, not adrenaline. And please don't forget to like and subscribe. Also, you can always grab one of our resources. There's the 90 Day Leader Development Plan available on our website with free resources, like the weekly reset routine, and the mental load reset. Remember, joyful, sustainable, and authentic leadership. Is possible and you deserve to enjoy every minute of it. Until next time, I'm Becky Hamm and this is joyfully unstoppable.