Are you a CEO who is doing all the work but still feeling stuck? You pour countless hours into your business, yet somehow, you’re the chief cook, bottle washer, and everything in between. If you feel like you’re carrying the entire operation on your back, the truth is you don’t have a workload problem—you have an ineffective pattern of leadership. Success in business and being a true CEO is about structure, not effort.
In this essential episode for any business owner, we dive deep into the painful dynamic where the founder becomes the “default workhorse”. We’ll reveal why growth often traps the leader in an unending cycle of hands-on labor, creating team dependency and turning the CEO into a bottleneck.
It’s time to stop jumping in to save the day and start building a business that runs itself. Discover the structural issues and lack of role clarity that are keeping you stuck, learn the strategic art of delegation (and how to tell which balls bounce and which balls break), and redefine your role identity to finally lead, not just labor. Read on to break free from the burden and ignite real movement in your business.
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When You’re Doing All the Work But Still Feeling Stuck (Leadership Edition)
The CEO Is The Default Workhorse
If you’re carrying your business on your back, chances are you do not have a workload problem. You, unfortunately, have developed an ineffective pattern of leadership. In this episode, we are going to look deeper at the dynamic where you as the business owner is working harder than everybody else and still not seeing any movement forward.
Despite your hard work ethic, it is not about effort. Success in business and being a true CEO, a true leader in your business is about structure. Too often, CEOs, as their business grows, end up being the default workhorse. Now, Gwen, tell me why that is. Why is it that no matter how big the business gets sometimes, the CEO is still the chief cook, bottle washer, and whatever that saying is.
Extracting The CEO Creates A Team Dependency Vacuum
I’m going to say it’s because of all the obvious reasons. The business built up around them. Pulling themselves out of that nucleus is really hard. I’ve got a client I’m working with right now that’s in the middle of that process. Although mentally she’s pulled herself out and doesn’t want to be that person, the other folks on the team don’t know how to fill in that hole.
It’s not that they aren’t capable, it’s not that she hasn’t told them, it’s none of those things. It’s just the reality of when you start extracting yourself or trying to extract yourself out of the business, there’s a fairly giant vacuum in there. Filling in that vacuum is not like filling a vacuum, and there it is. It’s actually the opposite of that. It’s actually more like healing a big wound or something. It takes time, and it has to grow very slowly and has to come in.
Unfortunately, because it’s a slow process, we tend to reinsert ourselves into it. To some degree, we have to, but working so that it can continue to fill in really is a hard process. I don’t think people talk about it very often. It’s one of those, “All you have to do is,” answers of, “All you have to do is delegate,” like that’s magically going to make it happen, but delegating to actually fill in that hole takes a long time. We don’t give it time. We expect that it’s just going to be instant. When it’s not instant, then we regress, which means we have to start the whole process over again.
In your example, what I’ve taken from what you just said is that vacuum that’s left behind part of the issue is that you’ve created a team that’s dependent on you. You pull yourself out, they feel abandoned sometimes, I think.
For sure. I don’t want to say there’s no way because I don’t ever believe that anything is not possible, but there’s almost no way that there’s not going to be some of that that’s going to – that’s going to happen. The problem is we usually wait. This is a horrible example, it’s grody, but I’m just going to use it anyway. It’s like if you have a cyst. If you remove it when it’s tiny, it takes no time for it to heal.
If the cyst gets big, it takes a really long time to heal, sometimes needs stitches, like it can be a big thing. That’s the situation. The business has grown up around you because that’s what’s naturally going to happen. The sooner that you can truly delegate, that you can get people to take real ownership, the easier it is to remove yourself from the business. Most of the time, we don’t start trying to remove ourselves from the business until it’s become so overwhelming and obvious.
At that point, we’re leaving a big space, which means it’s going to take a long time for people to actually get comfortable that you’re no longer in that space. I know it’s grody, but almost everybody can see it in that, and it’s unfortunately, it’s a better analogy than a lot because it’s really close to what the situation is because it’s grown up around you.
CEOs end up becoming a default workhorse because the business has grown up around them. We’ve got this historical record of, yeah, the boss does all the things, or run that by the boss, or whatever, which then of course develops team dependency. I think you didn’t mention it but in my experience, there’s also a little bit of like hero worship that happens in owner-operator organizations, especially if they’re led by their founder.
It’s back to its grown-up around them because they’ve always been the one that had all the answers. It’s assumed that they’re always going to have all the answers. There’s a point where the business grows to where we hear about it all the time and it’s really true, you want to hire people that are better than you, that are smarter than you, that are all of those things. Good bosses will be doing that, but those people still have seen you having all the answers and so they forget that it’s like, “No, actually, I don’t want to have this answer, you need to have the answer.”
The thing is just because the leader has all the answers doesn’t mean that your answers that you don’t have them too and that yours aren’t equally good. We’ve seen this also happen. Where there’s just a fear of delegation. Whether it’s a fear of delegating the wrong thing or a fear of that natural growing pain that happens with delegation. With that, what would you say are the structural issues in the business that are keeping the leader stuck as that default workhorse?
Here’s where the real issue is because it’s always a growing business, things are always under high pressure and so the easy answer, the fast answer is either I’ll do it myself or I’ll tell you what the answer is. We think that that’s benefiting the business because we’re able to go on to the next thing or they’re able to go on to the next thing, whatever it is. The reality is almost no one really learns from someone telling them.
How do they learn?
They learn by doing, by finding it out themselves, by figuring it out themselves, by screwing it out themselves.
I resemble that remark, Gwen.
We all do. That’s really the reality of it. Most of the things that we learn and retain and use consistently over time, we actually learned the hard way. Now, we may have been told where to find a piece of information. There may be pieces of information we need to have. At some point, part of it is just the doing of it.
I’ve seen this a lot in the organizations that this show tends to attract, but I’ve seen it in big corporate organizations as well. I’ve seen it with my husband and his work. As he got promoted, this was not a founder-led organization, anything, not even close. This is government, so not even close. When he got promoted, he wanted to help his new subordinates, who at least one had taken his previous job, by being there and helping them go through the process of the various things. I was completely okay with during the first like six months or a year.
By the end of the first year, it’s like, “This is not your job.” “It goes so much faster if I help.” “Yeah, but it’s still not your job.” Two or three or four or five years in, I was still having to say this because they didn’t really know how to do it. I finally had enough sense to say to him, I said, “How did you get so good at it?” He says, “It’s because I did it myself.” Yeah. That’s why they’re not learning, because you’ve empowered them to not learn.
I think that’s the problem that we have a lot, particularly in growing businesses, because like I said, the fast answer, because that was always why my husband would do. It is like “If we do it, it’ll take an hour and a half, but if they have to do it by themselves it’s going to take 5 or 6 hours.” the next time, it’ll take them probably three hours and the next time it’ll take them an hour and a half.
What happens is we get caught in the “Let’s just solve the problem. We’ll just solve the problem.” All it’s doing is continuing to create the problem because the real problem is they don’t know how to do it. They’re not taking ownership. They don’t have the pieces. It’s not the tactical thing that’s not getting done. That’s not actually the problem.
The CEO Is A Bottleneck Due To Lack Of Empowerment And Role Clarity
What you’re saying points to this but I think there’s a lot of habits that create a situation where the CEO is the bottleneck. This is one. The CEO has to jump in and bail everybody out. I do think having the CEO as a bottleneck is a structural problem but to your point in our last episode, it’s much more of a symptom than it is an actual root cause. There are varying root causes that lead the CEO to being the bottleneck. One is, as you pointed out, they’re not empowering their people to solve the problems they have to come in and save the day.
Another situation is back to people not being clear what their responsibility actually is.
Ambiguity.
Yeah, and truly role clarity. Back to this happens a lot in a growing business because when we started, we were doing this. Now we were doing this, and now we’re doing this, and now we’re doing this. It becomes this mishmash of things. Often early on, Suzy is doing thing A, thing B, thing C, thing D, and thing E. It made sense because Suzy was one of your only resources.
Now you’ve got 4 people and Suzy’s still doing those 5 things, but 2 of those things really belong to Fred, and 1 of those things really belongs to Jane. Jane knows that she probably should be doing it, but Suzy still thinks she has ownership of it and so a lot of that’s coming back to the CEO, the owner, to get clarity or it’s having to go from Jane to the CEO, back to Suzy, back to the CEO.
There’s a lot of places where that role clarity of who actually owns it. If they can’t fully own it, then we’re back to bottleneck because who always owns everything in the very end is the CEO. A lot of things the CEO doesn’t need to own on an average day-to-day basis, but they still do because we don’t have role clarity.
When we don’t have role clarity, back to your favorite topic, we have gaps in accountability.
Absolutely. At that point, it becomes really hard because we because then the only person that actually is accountable back to is the CEO. When the only person that’s accountable to the success of the business is the CEO, then you’re always going to have a bottleneck.
When the only person accountable for the success of the business is the CEO, there will always be a bottleneck. Share on XIf you’re reading this and you’re the CEO who’s like, “I am the default workhorse. I am the one carrying the burden. I’m paying people to share the burden but for some reason it all comes back to me,” how do you redistribute the work without the CEO’s worst nightmare, which is dropping critical balls? We talk about this all the time. They don’t know what to delegate because they don’t feel like anything is safe to delegate or because they’ve been the default workhorse, they’re not confident that if they step out and completely delegate the thing will get done. How do you redistribute the work?
Part of the problem that I see a lot is that the CEO is used to running at a gazillion miles an hour. The way I describe it is the CEO is usually a Ferrari or Lamborghini, depending on where you land. It always cracks me up when I see a Ferrari or Lamborghini running around town some place because those cars are not designed to go 15 miles an hour.
What? They’re not designed to drop the kids off at school?
They are not designed to drop the kids off at school. They’re designed to be on racetracks and the Autobahn. They’re designed to go fast. They need to go fast to continue to function. If they’re always running around town, they’re actually going to break down way faster. Most CEOs, quite honestly, are Ferraris. That’s the nature of who they are. They are Ferraris. They may have hired some high-performance Toyotas or Lexuses, that’s still a pretty high-performance car, but it’s not the same. You don’t actually want everyone to be a Ferrari because that actually doesn’t work either. You actually need these other folks.
Letting People Learn Which Balls Bounce And Which Balls Break
The problem is most CEOs start setting unrealistic expectations and are not giving enough space and time for people to actually get the work done in the way that they need to get the work done. They keep taking things back. They’re assuming that everything that drops is going to break and is going to create this massive problem. Where the reality is a lot of things can drop and if you let them drop, they’ll bounce.
What you really need to do is let them see it’s like “That dropped, that bounced, we’re okay. That one broke. You got to pay attention to that next time. You can’t let that break.” let people make their mistakes, understand how long it really takes, do all of those things so that they start taking full ownership. Which means when it breaks, the owner doesn’t clean up the glass.
“Okay, go get the broom, go get the dustpan, pick it up, get yourself cut on the shard. You’ve got to deal with all of that.” You’ve got to have all of the consequences. You’ve got to have the win consequences but you also have to have the lose consequences, whatever they are. Often, the owner has gotten used to being able to make things happen so quickly that when it doesn’t, they feel like it’s a failure even if it’s not.
Part of it is them being able to say, “I’ve got really good team, they are not Ferraris. I can’t run them like a Ferrari,” as I said, making them also have ownership of it. Back to this process takes time because you don’t want to just delegate big things without gaining understanding and trust. I think we’ve probably have 2 or 3 episodes where we’ve talked about this before. That process takes time. That’s where most people are really struggling is because at the point that they want to delegate it, they just want it delegated and that’s it.
They want to dump it. They don’t want to delegate because delegating takes work and time, and attention.
Yeah, perfect phrase. They just want it off their plate. They just want it done. That’s not actually delegation. You’re right. The dump is a perfect description for it. They just want to dump it out. They want to completely abdicate on their responsibility of it. That’s one of the places that it becomes hard. When folks aren’t stepping up, it probably means you’re not communicating enough.
You and I have had this conversation privately and I think publicly more than once, which is we forget how many things we know and we make assumptions on. Most of the time, the problem I see is we aren’t giving enough of the why behind the action or the behavior for someone else to own it in a way that we want them to own it because the why is so obvious to us because the business built around us.
When I think about it, things that have worked for me in my past employment history, just being clear on what the priorities, back to your point of the balls that break versus the balls that bounce, I worked for an organization that was all remote and they were definitely remote first. It was very rare when you had a question that you could reach somebody who had the answer right then and there.
I remember early on the person who was supervising me said, “At the end of the day, all that matters to us is the client experience. If you’re facing something, just default to whatever gives the client the best experience. If you make a mistake, don’t beat yourself up for anything that didn’t have a direct impact on the client experience, because that’s the only thing we’re going to come to you to fix.”
“If you mess up some like back-end spreadsheet formatting, you delete the whole back-end spreadsheet, is our ops team going to be ticked? Heck yeah. You know what? You’ll still have a job here because you didn’t affect our client experience. You can rebuild it.” I think part of it is letting your team know what you lose sleep over and what you don’t so that they’re not fretting over things that you think are inconsequential.
The other thing that happens as you’re going through this is helping them understand you want them to know more about it than you do.
Yes, so that they don’t worry about stepping on your toes or making you look bad or feel bad.
That is also a really hard thing for CEO founders to release. You have to be really conscious. It’s like, “No, I don’t want to be involved in this decision and I don’t need to be involved in this decision because I know you actually can make a better decision than I can at this point.” Getting folks to where they really understand that that is true.
It’s the hardest thing as you start building up team underneath you. When you say it in a large environment, people are like, “No, why would they know that?” yet we think that in a smaller environment that it should be true. The classic thing is like does the CEO of Coke really know how to make Coca-Cola? My guess is no. Maybe. I doubt it.
At some point, way back when the CEO of Coca-Cola did know how to make Coca-Cola. Over time, that changed. I have no idea when that was, but over time, that changes. At some point, it’s like I don’t have to actually know how to do all of these things. I need to know who knows, or I need to know who knows, depending on how big the organization is. I need to be aware of these things, but I don’t necessarily need to be the one who knows these things. That’s a tough transition, I think, for most CEOs.
Adjusting the CEO Role Identity
That actually leads right into my next question because I think as you’re laying this all out, I’m like, “Their identity does get tangled in.” It’s like, “Okay, I’m the founder, I’m the entrepreneur, I’m the CEO,” but then somewhere along the lines, their identity is tangled into all functions of the business, regardless of how many people they’ve hired. How do you adjust your role identity?
I think the first step, I’ll just feed you that one, I know, is understanding what is the role of a CEO. You always say your number one job as CEO is to ensure the health and well-being of your business, not anybody else. What does that mean? Which aspects of the business are most important? After you understand that piece, how do you work to adjust that role identity so that you are spending your time in that space and not over here doing what honestly feels good because it’s a lot more instant gratification?
Your number one job as CEO is to ensure the health and well-being of your business—not anyone else’s. Share on XBalancing the piece, and I’d love to say like I have a magic bullet but that’s not the way my world works. One of the things is also to understand what are the pieces that either you bring unique skills to and/or that you really love, and saying, “The pieces that I don’t bring unique skills to,” making sure that you have people who do.
Really empowering them and saying, “I need for you to be the expert on this. I need to be able to ask you questions, I need you to not have to ask me questions about this thing that you are the expert on.” now, there may be aspects where I need to brainstorm with you because you and I have enough knowledge together to be able to figure something out. It’s not that I’m expecting you to solve the problem for me.
This is where we start filling in that gap because everyone counts on the CEO to be the person. Going back to the Coca-Cola example, there was a point, like I said, I have no idea when, I don’t have any history, but there was a point when the manufacturing process changed enough that the CEO no longer knew all of the right steps. They may have known the formula for how to make it, but they didn’t know how to run all of the various pieces of machinery and equipment and all of the things.
Deflecting Questions To The Right Expert
Sometimes it’s a time issue, but sometimes it’s a growth issue because it doesn’t make sense. That to me is the piece that people have to be really aware of. You’ve got to figure out if you’re pulling yourself out, who is the expert coming in and is everyone understand that that’s that expert now. That’s who it is, it’s not me. Part of that then is deflecting back any questions to the right person and saying, “It’s fine that you came to me, but that was a waste of your time. You need to go to Tonya, because Tonya actually knows that piece of information. I don’t.” Even if you do know it, to make it sound like, “Yeah, I’m not sure that I have current information. You need to check with Tonya.”
That’s a great question, to go ask Tonya.
Yeah, so that they start seeing you’re not in that hole anymore, like I said, even if you actually do know the answer.
I want to speak to the CEO who’s like, “This sounds great and all, but they have trust issues.” Maybe it’s because in their mind, they’ve tried to delegate before and it’s just blown up in their face. I love what you’re saying, Gwen, but how do you let go of the trust issues? How do you develop the trust? I know you would say the trust goes both ways, the staff has to trust you as well to not take things back away. How do you go to developing that trust as you’re redefining your identity within your own organization?
Building Trust Through Consistency And Incremental Testing
The first is to really go through. Be prepared that the delegation process, true delegation where someone else has ownership, is not going to be instant. If it’s a super simple task, it can be instant, but most of the time it’s not instant. A lot of this we’ve been talking about it in our other work, is setting up consistency and that takes time, because the first time it’s like “I’m in,” and the second time, “I’m in,” and then the third time it’s like, “I’m not quite so in,” and the fourth time it’s like, “It’ll just be easier to do it myself.” at that point, you get to start all over again right back at the beginning.
Being consistent with the process and not reverting because it’ll be easier is one of the big pieces for building the trust. Most of the reason I see most people lose the trust is because they’re like, “We’ve been doing this for three months,” and it’s like, “Yeah, but you took it back 5 times out of the out of the 20 times that it was gone.” You haven’t actually been doing it for six months or whatever. You’ve really only been doing this for about a month and a half because there every time you do that, it resets the clock, no matter how tedious it feels.
The other is doing it incrementally. Obviously, first is to make sure do they actually know how to do the thing and there there’s some early steps. As you start getting to a place that you want them to really take ownership is to start testing do they know enough to take ownership. If they come to you and say, “Should I do X or Y?” you don’t answer anymore. You say, “What do you think you should do? Why do you believe that’s the best answer? What would be an alternative? Why would that be a better answer? Why would that be a worse answer?” It’s actually taking time to get into their brain to see how they’re thinking about it.
Once you understand how they’re thinking about it, then you can say, “They’re thinking about it correctly,” or, “They’re not thinking about it correctly, they’re missing some piece of information.” Sometimes you can fix it, sometimes you can’t. If you can’t, then you need to just say, “Cut bait, this person’s not going to be able to take this on because they can’t think in the way I need them to think.”
Not that they’re a bad person or they’re stupid or anything else. Sometimes it’s about experience, sometimes it’s just the way our brain works it’s all those things. Once you get past the, “Can they do the task,” then we need to get into understanding how they think. That’s where we really start building the trust. You and I have had these conversations many times before of I know how you think enough that I know that you’ll make choices that I want you to make, even when your answer is not the answer I would have given. I’m okay with that.
It’s not so antithetical to what I would do that it’s problematic. That to me is where you start really building the trust piece. It’s coming back to when they come to you, it’s like, “I don’t want you to come to me. I want you to come to me only when this situation, that situation, the other situation.” That allows the trust to be built over time.
Of course, the hard trick is when it breaks, because it probably will, something will happen is to not revert clear back to the beginning again. Only go back as far as you need to go. Sometimes it’s just a mistake. Things happen. Do not overreact and completely lose it. Sometimes it’s like, “The fact that you thought that was okay, you’re fired.” It’s like, “I trusted you and my gosh, I had no reason to trust you if you thought that was okay.” Most of the time, it’s a mistake, and to be clear on how did that happen, what do we make sure it happens so that doesn’t happen again?
Breaking Free From Being the Bottleneck in Your Business
That’s a good place to leave it, I think. To sum it up, when you’re doing all the work but you still feel stuck, ultimately, what has happened in your business, whether you realize it or not, is you’ve become the default workhorse. You’ve become the default workhorse, as Gwen pointed out, because the business got built up around you, so of course it did. In many cases, unless you’ve in very intentionally built out your business, there was no other way for it to get built out.
That’s going to happen like 95% of the time. It’s just the natural way of things.
Right, but you’ve got to recognize it and part of how you recognize it, right, is you’re the bottleneck, and a lot of times what leads to being the bottleneck is you don’t have role clarity. As you’ve hired people, there’s just fuzzy, blurry lines in between what they do and you do and all of those things leads to gaps in accountability and that’s why all the decisions end up landing at your doorstep and nothing moves forward until you move it forward.
A lot of times, the bottleneck in a business comes from a lack of role clarity. When responsibilities between you and your team are fuzzy, it creates gaps in accountability—and suddenly every decision ends up back on your desk, and nothing moves unless… Share on XYou’ve got to redistribute the work and, as Gwen said, it is possible to do that without dropping any balls in making sure that people understand what you expect of them, right, what their good, better, best targets are in performance. That you when push comes to shove, or when they run into a challenge, that you let them drop the ball so that they can learn from experience which balls bounce and which balls break.
I love that analogy, Gwen. I love that one, probably that’s my favorite analogy you’ve ever come up with. Finally, when it comes to adjusting that role identity, because that’s the job only you can do because you’re probably going to have the hardest time with it, is it really comes to building trust. Trust with yourself, trust with your team and in doing that your team will trust you in return.
These are the sorts of thoughts, of conversations that CEOs need to have regularly. If you’re not in the practice of having these types of reflective conversations, a great next step for you, especially if this episode has resonated, is to subscribe to Gwen’s Question email every week. Now, it’s only a two-way conversation if you want it to be.
You don’t have to respond, but every Friday, a question from Gwen is going to land in your inbox. A question that will prompt you to spend 5 to 10 minutes really reflecting on what’s going on in your business and how that compares to what you want happening in your business. If you reply, Gwen’s going to respond to you. If you don’t reply, that’s okay, another question lands in your inbox the following Friday. You can sign up at www.tonyakubo.com/question and until then, we’ll see you next time.
Mentioned in This Episode
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.
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