Diagnostic Pattern
"The team can't function without me"
The symptom is real. The cause is usually somewhere else.
You're in every decision. You're stuck in the business and never get to work on it. It looks like a team that isn't ready to carry the load. It may actually be an environment that gives them no shared criteria to decide by. That's an Opportunity gap, not a talent gap.
What you think it is
The team can't function without me. I'm in every decision. I'm stuck in the business and never get to work on it.
So you wait for your people to step up. Or you hire someone more senior to take the work off your plate.
What it usually is
A hypothesis to test, not an indictment on you or the team.
Run COM-B and this looks like a Capability problem: the team isn't good enough yet. The missing leg may actually be Opportunity. The environment gives no shared, prioritized criteria to decide by, so every call routes back to you. The decision rules live in your head, and your identity is fused to the work. That's the leadership side of the system, not a talent shortage.
How to tell
When your team gets stuck, are they missing the answer? Or are they missing the shared criteria that would let them reach your answer without you in the room?
The move
Start with the leg, not the hire. Run COM-B: rate Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation, and find the binding constraint before you prescribe. A senior hire is a Capability move, but the real constraint is usually Opportunity, so build the missing criteria first. Decide from guiding principles, not core values: values sit in the eye of the beholder and can't align a team, while prioritized guiding principles are shared, so your people decide consistently without you. Hire before that and you've just added one more person who routes the call back to you.
You might think your people need to step up. It may actually be that nothing lets them decide without you.
Not sure this is your real bottleneck?
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