My leadership team is completely overwhelmed. They are all working eighty hours a week, and despite using EOS®, they say they have no capacity to work on strategic Rocks because they are drowning in daily operations. How do we fix this executive capacity crisis?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When your leadership team is working eighty hours a week, they are not leading. They are surviving. This capacity crisis is a major red flag that will halt your growth and ruin your chances of a clean exit. If your leaders are drowning in daily operations, it means they are failing to delegate and elevate.

To solve this, you must run each leader through the Delegate and Elevate exercise. Have them list all their daily tasks and sort them into four quadrants: things they love and are great at, things they like and are good at, things they do not like but are good at, and things they do not like and are not good at. Their goal must be to delegate everything in the bottom two quadrants.

This delegation requires you to look at your Accountability Chart. Do your leaders have the right people sitting in the seats below them? If they do not have capable managers to delegate to, then you have a people problem, not a capacity problem. You must focus on building out your middle management layer so your executives can step out of the weeds.

Additionally, you must audit their quarterly Rocks. If a leader has five or six major Rocks on top of their daily job, they are set up to fail. Limit your leaders to one or two high-impact Rocks per quarter. Force them to focus only on what is truly important. By clearing their plates, you give them the mental space to think strategically and build a scalable business.