A leader explains how to reframe team problems as bottlenecks and opportunities, then track them on a running list. Bottlenecks are normal signs of growth, not failure, and leaders often need to solve them because team members are already at capacity.
If you're a leader and if you decide that you're going to take on the role of solving a particular problem in your team, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing because frankly, your people probably are at or above full capacity already. They showed up and they've got work to do that day. There's just the general whirlwind, the maintenance of the business. So when we're doing this, we don't refer to them as problems or issues or challenges. We call them bottlenecks and opportunities. And so we maintain a running B and O list, bottlenecks and opportunities list. So it's not a problems list. It's just these are the bottlenecks and these are the opportunities for additional scale. Bottlenecks are always going to occur in any business that is growing. So if the bottleneck and opportunity has occurred in your particular area, that doesn't mean that something is broken. It means that something right happened somewhere else.
