The indispensable managing director is the bottleneck

There’s a question I ask almost every managing director I work with: “What would happen if you went away tomorrow for two weeks without your phone?” Most of them laugh. Some go serious. Very few answer “nothing, everything would keep running”.

If the company depends on you being there, you have a problem. And it isn’t your team’s. It’s yours.

I was that managing director too

I’m not going to tell you this never happened to me. I may not have been indispensable, but I was very important. And not because I hoarded knowledge, which I’ve never done, but because of my drive and the way I make decisions.

I realised something uncomfortable: people are often afraid to decide. And when they have someone beside them who decides quickly and confidently, it’s very easy to wait for that person to do it. Without meaning to, my speed was becoming the perfect excuse for others not to take the step.

That’s the most dangerous kind of indispensable managing director: not the one who hoards, but the one who does it so well that nobody else tries.

How I stopped being one: delegating, but properly

Delegating isn’t handing over a task and disappearing. That’s abandoning. I stopped being the bottleneck by delegating with three rules:

1. Share all the knowledge I have. Holding nothing back. If the person doesn’t have the information I have, they can’t decide as I would, let alone better.
2. Check that the person has the skills. The technical ones, of course. But above all, the soft skills: judgement, communication, the ability to handle pressure and other people.
3. Reinforce my philosophy: I tolerate mistakes, not apathy. Whoever decides will get it wrong sometimes, and that’s part of learning. What I don’t accept is not trying, not caring or not owning up.

That last rule changes everything. If your team believes mistakes get punished, they’ll never decide anything without asking you. And you’ll be indispensable again.

The hardest thing to let go of

What I found hardest to delegate was drawing up the strategic plan and the annual budget. It’s the heart of the company. For years I’d done it myself.

I delegated it to three people: the general manager, the sales director and the finance director. And do you know what happened? They did it better than me.

I’m not saying that out of modesty. They were closer to the day-to-day, they knew the customers and the numbers better, and because it was their plan, they committed to it in a way they never would have with a plan of mine.

That day I understood two things. First: the company comes before people and job titles, mine included. Second: our job as leaders isn’t to do, it’s to develop other leaders.

Where to start delegating

If you find it hard to let go, don’t start with the strategic plan. Start with what doesn’t need soft skills and is purely technical work:

• Preparing reports.
• Contacting people to schedule meetings and events.
• Managing and supervising projects that need daily follow-up.

These are tasks that eat up a huge number of the managing director’s hours and that someone else can do just as well or better with good instructions. Every hour you win back there is an hour to think, for your team or for your customers.

Then go up a step: decisions with clear limits. “You can approve discounts of up to 5%”, “you can hire suppliers for up to €3,000 without asking me”. And when that works, the next one: whole outcomes, not individual tasks.

The ultimate test

A managing director who has done their job well can go away for a week and come back to a company that has kept running. Maybe some things were done differently. Maybe some were done better. That’s the goal.

If you can’t go away today, don’t blame yourself. But start preparing for that week. It’s the best investment you can make in your company, and in yourself.

The ON delegation matrix helps you decide what to delegate, to whom and with what limits.