A short spoken-piece by Chad Silverstein explaining the "Gap trap": leaders who personally fill operational gaps instead of delegating, which prevents company growth. He emphasizes hiring people better than you for roles, staying in your lane, using EOS to clarify roles and accountability, and building leaders who build leaders.
Chapters
I think the Gap trap's a nice way of saying you're a control freak. Someone who thinks they are the only ones who can do the job. I always laugh whenever I'm talking to someone who's in a position. They own a company, they started a company and they say they can't hire someone. They can't because they don't have the time or because they have to be the ones that does the sales. They can't stop doing what they're doing to train someone else. And basically what they're saying is they can't grow. Because if you don't have time to train someone else to do something so that you can lift yourself and elevate to the next level of whatever it is that you're going to be doing, your company, then you're going to be stuck in the same place forever. And the Gap trap is when you kind of are doing both, you figure, hey, you know, if you want to get the job done, you just got to get it done yourself. And it's just not the case. The truth is, is that there's always someone who can do it better than you. They just may not be on your team yet, but there's always someone who can do it better than you. And, you know, when I started my company and I trained every person in my company in every role, so I did every position, you know, I definitely fell into this trap, you know, I. And I. And I definitely swooped in and made life really hard for myself. And so I had to really focus on hiring the right people and hiring people who are better than me and who can do the job and who love doing what I didn't like doing to get out of that gap trap. And I think that's the key is to one, identify what you're really good at and then stay in your lane. This is why EOS was such a powerful tool for my company, because it allowed us to compartmentalize all of our roles so we know who is in charge of what. And then it's like, stay in your box. Stay in your. In your lane. So if someone knows, you know there's a problem with something, they know exactly who to go to and who's addressing it, and we can hold you accountable to that. Whereas if you have people who are the jack of all trades and they're going around and everybody else's, you know, responsibilities and, you know, just because they can, you know, the curse of capabilities, it doesn't mean that you should just because you can and you get yourself in a heap of trouble. If you're just going to try to fill in that gap of whatever your team is experiencing because you can get the job done instead of doing what leaders should be focused on, which is building other leaders, who can build other leaders. And that is the true sign of a leader. Think about that. If you can build a leadership team that then is leading another leadership team or other leaders and they can build them up and you're not involved with that, that. That is an incredible, incredible feat that someone could accomplish in their career and not easily done. If you're going to swoop in and do everybody's job just because you can, don't be in the trap. Figure out where you're in the trap. Where you are, where you shouldn't be. Sometimes it requires you getting some feedback from people that it's going to be hard to hear. And again, if you ask, make sure you're prepared to hear it and not respond to it. And when I say not respond, I mean just not maybe right away and not out of anger. So figure out where you're in the gap trap. If you're watching this, you're probably a high performer in some area of your life, and you probably are in the gap trap at some. In some level, in some place. So try to figure out where that is. It's probably where you least expect it, and it might require you to do some writing to figure that out.
