3 ways you may unknowingly be creating a bottleneck

Growing up my sisters and I would bake cookies regularly, initially under the watchful eye of my mother and then on our own. We would pull out the yellow Sunbeam mixer and all the required ingredients, crack the eggs, measure the flour, and generally make a big mess. It was an all-afternoon affair that resulted in delicious cookies. I still enjoy baking chocolate chip cookies today, unfortunately my older, more calendared self gets frustrated at the bottleneck of cookie baking – the oven.

No matter how many trays I fill with balls of dough, there is a limited number that fit in the oven. I must wait 8 – 10 minutes before I can move the next set of trays into the oven. It is a bottleneck I have recognized since very early in my baking life. As a result, I tend to gravitate towards brownies so I can put one pan in the oven, pull it out when the baking is complete, and the entire process is complete. While the time to bake a pan of brownies may equate to the total time to bake a full batch of cookies, I prefer not being stuck in the kitchen waiting to move trays in 10-minute intervals.

Bottlenecks are everywhere. It is a physical thing, person or process that causes a constriction, reducing the desired flow. Whether it is baking, traffic, craft time with three kids and one glue stick, manufacturing a product, or delivering a service, you can experience bottlenecks. When the flow of your business is inhibited, you have a bottleneck, which causes you and your business to fall behind.

As a business owner, it is often easy to recognize bottlenecks in your business. Delays in getting a product out are caused by a broken machine. Service calls are not returned timely because a team member is on leave. Often, however, you are the bottleneck. When you start to notice you are not achieving the ideal flow of your business, it may be that you are the cause.

If you want to remove or avoid bottlenecks, take the time to assess if you are unknowingly creating bottlenecks in one of these three ways.

1)      Not providing direct access to information or tools your team needs to do their job

You have delegated tasks or projects to team members, but if they need to come to you for information, or access to the tools to get the task or project done, you are creating a bottleneck. Your team is busy. They identify when it is best to execute on the project based on their schedules and energy levels. Adding steps and additional duration to the project as they come to you for details or access to the right resources slows things down. Now they are waiting and coordinating schedules to be available when you are to make sure things can move forward.  

That bottleneck can be avoided by ensuring they have access to all the details from the start. Whether it is certain permissions in a software program, a budget for a project, access to a contact, or anything else that they should have access to for efficiency, work to get them what they need and avoid being the reason projects get delayed.

2)      Canceling 1:1s with your team members

You have scheduled regular one-on-ones with your team member indicating you will be available to them and want to support them in having what they need to do their job. Your team members know they can get answers to their questions or support on a project during those one-on-ones. Then you cancel them.

Deprioritizing the time dedicated to supporting your team members creates a bottleneck. They likely built their completion plan around getting the information they needed in that meeting. Now the schedule for completing the task or project gets pushed back while they work to connect with you to get what you need. This bottleneck can be avoided by holding your one-on-ones sacred. If they must be canceled, prioritize getting them rescheduled as close to the original time as possible.

3)      Lacking clearly defined processes

When you started your business, you did it all. You knew exactly how things needed to get completed and every step from A to Z. As elements of a process has been delegated, you have explained what needs to be done but not clearly defined who is responsible for each component. Without knowing who does each step of the process, team members cannot be held accountable, and processes move slower than needed or are not executed efficiently.

As the business owner, you create the bottleneck when you are not able to hold your team accountable for their steps in each process. You need to document each core process of the organization and assign someone to own each step. Then communicate with all team members involved in the process so everyone knows what needs to happen. When this is in place, processes can run more smoothly and not cause unnecessary slowdowns.

It is easy to get frustrated when things slowdown in your business. You know what needs to be done to deliver on your commitments. But you can only move as fast as the slowest piece of your process. When you start to see a backlog, and things slowing down, it is always good to evaluate what is causing the bottleneck and then takes step to ease the constriction. Sometimes it is an easy fix to eliminate the bottleneck and sometimes it requires a more challenging assessment of circumstances within the organization. It also may require buying a second oven to achieve greater efficiency, but in the end, the delicious chocolate chip cookies will be worth it.