Why Your Managers Are the Bottleneck (And What to Do About it)

Most founders I talk to aren't struggling because the business isn't working. They're struggling because every manager runs things a little differently, and without consistent leadership, poor behavior goes unaddressed long enough to become the new normal. When that gap goes unaddressed, the problems that should be solved at the manager level start landing back on the founder's desk.

A founder's time is the most valuable resource in the business, and every hour spent managing problems that should have been resolved at the manager level is an hour that isn't going toward growth. When that keeps happening, the founder ends up doing two jobs, their own and the one their managers should be doing, and that's not a pace anyone can sustain.

The good news is that this is one of the more solvable problems a growing business faces, and it rarely requires adding headcount or making sweeping changes to fix it. Most managers who are struggling don't need to be replaced, they need a clear framework that tells them exactly what is expected of them and rise to meet it. This allows the founder to stop being the last line of defense for problems that should have been solved further down the chain.

While much more is needed as a business scales, there are a few critical basics that serve as a foundation for managers to lead consistently and for the business to stop absorbing the cost of that gap.

Founders will want to start with a clear people framework, meaning documented expectations, updated employee agreements or handbooks, and a disciplinary process that managers can follow without calling the founder every time something comes up. We'd highly recommend including a consistent onboarding and training experience to ensure each team member starts with the same understanding of what is expected of them, regardless of who hired them or which manager they report to.

The next layer includes a communication and leadership structure. We'd suggest defining what decisions managers can make on their own, how to deliver feedback in real time, how often managers are expected to connect with their team members, and where employees can bring concerns to ensure two-way communication is a requirement and not an afterthought.

Additionally, it's vital to make sure managers are trained and empowered to deliver it all uniformly, because a framework that lives in a document but never gets implemented consistently isn't a framework at all.

This is exactly the type of problem Elle Mathis & Co. was built to solve, and the goal is never to create dependency, it's to build a leadership layer that runs without the founder in the middle. Once that structure is in place, many founders find it valuable to keep that resource close, someone who already knows the business and can help them think through people decisions as the company grows, without having to start from scratch every time something comes up.

If any of this sounds familiar, a good place to start is the [Founder Assessment]. It takes a few minutes to complete and gives you a picture of where your business stands from a people perspective and where the biggest risks are hiding. From there, we can talk through what makes sense for your team.