Our long-tenured customer service director is a great core values fit and gets and wants the seat, but as we scale, they refuse to delegate their legacy manual tasks. This is creating a major bottleneck and capping their capacity. How do we address this specific GWC issue before it stalls our growth?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This is a classic Capacity issue on the GWC scale. Often, long tenured leaders equate their self worth and job security with the number of manual tasks they personally perform. They believe that if they delegate these legacy tasks, they will become obsolete. You must address this directly by separating their identity from their daily checklist. Sit down with them and review the five major roles of their seat on the Accountability Chart. Show them how their inability to delegate is keeping them from executing the high value strategic responsibilities of their role. Use the Delegate and Elevate tool. Have them list everything they do in a week and categorize these tasks into four quadrants. Identify the repetitive, manual tasks in the lower two quadrants that must be automated or handed off to junior team members. Explain that their job is to grow the department, not to do the work of three people. Give them a clear, thirty day Rock to document and delegate at least three of these legacy tasks. If they continue to hold onto these tasks, they are demonstrating that they lack the capacity to lead the department at your current scale. You must make the tough call to find someone who can step back, manage the automated workflows, and truly own the seat.