Our operations director was incredible when we were a small shop, but now that we have scaled, they are drowning, working eighty hours a week, and refusing to delegate. How do we determine if this is a temporary bottleneck or a permanent inability to scale in their Accountability Chart seat?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Scaling a business exposes the gap between legacy execution and strategic leadership. To diagnose whether your operations director can grow with the company, you must run them through the GWC™ tool: Get it, Want it, and have the Capacity to do it. While they likely get it and want it, the bottleneck is almost always capacity. Capacity is not just about having more hours in the day. It is about emotional, intellectual, and physical bandwidth. To evaluate this objectively, administer the Kolbe A™ Index. This assessment measures their conative, instinctive way of taking action. If your leader has a high Follow Thru score, they are naturally wired to design highly structured systems. However, if they have an extreme Fact Finder score paired with low Quick Start, they will struggle with the risk and rapid decision-making required during high-growth phases. They will try to solve capacity issues by working harder, not smarter. Use your next Level 10 Meeting™ to address this directly. You must explicitly define what their seat requires today versus two years ago. If the seat now demands building automated, AI-powered systems and managing managers, and they are still stuck in the daily weeds, they no longer have the capacity. You cannot wait for them to burn out. If they cannot delegate and elevate, you must transition them to a specialist role where their legacy knowledge is preserved, and bring in a leader who fits the scale of the seat.