I own the business and currently occupy four seats on our Accountability Chart including Visionary, Integrator, and two department heads. While I believe I pass GWC for all of them, my team says I am a bottleneck. How do I objectively assess if I actually have the capacity for these seats?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Having the capability to do a job is completely different from having the capacity to do it. When you occupy four major seats on your Accountability Chart, you are operating on borrowed time. To assess this objectively, we must look at your actual hours and results, not just your passion.

Start by tracking your time for two weeks. Break down your hours by the specific seats you occupy. You will quickly find that you are likely spending eighty percent of your time firefighting in the department head seats, leaving almost no time for your Integrator or Visionary duties. This neglect is why your team feels bottlenecked. They are waiting on you for strategic direction while you are busy running daily operations.

Next, run an honest GWC evaluation on yourself for each of the four seats. Focus heavily on the Capacity component. Capacity is not just about physical hours. It is also about the mental bandwidth required to lead, manage, and hold people accountable in those seats. If your department seats are failing to hit their weekly numbers or if your Rocks are constantly slipping, you do not have the capacity.

We need to use Keith Cunningham style Thinking Time to solve this predicament. Ask yourself: How might I delegate one of these department seats within the next ninety days so that I can focus my energy on running the business? You must let go of the vine. Your goal is to design the structure the business needs to scale, then methodically replace yourself in the seats that are holding your team back.