At some point, early on, she told me, "I make great decisions, so why can’t my agency keep up?"
A bit later, I remember waiting for Angela, the CEO, to respond to my requests from two weeks prior. She promised that she would get right on it after our call… Multiple calls, actually. And I even received an email from her a few days ago saying that she would be getting to them soon. Or maybe it was one of her people who relayed that to me, "Tell Jack...."
As an organizational consultant and Coach, I always find this sort of situation interesting. I get paid for my time, and because I do a good job, it's not a small amount of money that Angela approved for me to help make things better. And she had assured me that she wants things to get better as soon as possible, and even asked how much more time do I need, AKA when are you going to fix this, Jack?
This, coming from the person who is making me wait for the information I need. And that tells me something.
Mine is the experience of everyone else in the company as well…maybe worse, or maybe better, if you assume they know how to get her attention better than I do. What that means is an organization where everything goes through Angela, an organization designed, probably unintentionally, to give Angela the feeling of maximum control.
How it got built.
How did it get like this? I can't know for sure, but I can tell where we are: it is the founders trap, and it's something that the organization grew into. Some time ago, the organization was small enough that it made sense for Angela to be in the middle of everything. And as the organization grew, the way that it operated needed to change, but it did not.
Angela was always the sharpest tool in the shed, the smartest person in the room, and that's why it is her agency. But growth often builds structure around those virtues instead of replacing them with a more professionalized organization.
I can't think of any agency where this was consciously designed…that the founder said, I want to be the bottleneck for everything that happens in the company despite the fact that this will make my life incredibly miserable, plus all the side effects upon everyone else involved.
No, it was just a creeping set of behaviors that locked themselves into a process model and the structure, because nobody tried to do anything different than that. There was work to get done, deadlines to meet, and no time to retool the organization. And it was probably what Angela felt most comfortable with.
The Swoop and Poop Loop.
That the organization becomes reliant on Angela for all the major decisions means that decisions are delayed and crises develop regularly. In fact, as I later discovered, people had gotten used to the idea that she was going to fix whatever they did, so they just didn't try as hard.
Just do something...Angela will fix it.
Rather than developing confidence in each other, and the way the organization operated, everyone focused their confidence on the fact that Angela would come in and save the day, no matter how painful the discussions might be or even the signs on her face of how disappointed she was with what they had done…the project would get saved, the client would be happy, and they could call it a win… Or at least not a loss.
The worst thing that could happen to Angela in this situation is that the organization grows… The load on Angela between rescues and new business, and just day-to-day decision management grows geometrically every time the organization adds a new person or client. And what was a nimble 15 or 20 person organization, is now a plodding 45 person organization.
The CEO's Latency Blindness.
If you ask Angela whether she makes decisions quickly, she says yes, of course she does. She might even lament that she makes better decisions than anyone. That's one form of blindness right there: the way her people will get better at decisions is by having the opportunity to make them.
The way to judge a CEO is not by how good their decision-making is, but how good the decision-making is in the organization around them.
But there's also a more insidious form of blindness, latency blindness, because she is so focused on each decision – even hyper-focused – she doesn't notice that there are 20 other decisions queued up, some of them not even submitted because people know better than to submit too many decisions too soon to her. Instead, they are deferred and and will show up later when she reviews work that didn't get her input when it was needed earlier.
I can feel the frustration others must feel sitting in the queue. It is a job skill, knowing how to climb to the top of her list better then others. She's blind to the cost of all the waiting she is making others do. I never found out exactly but I think I was probably one of 15 people waiting for multiple days on things.
A wide body of research supports this distinction: reducing decision latency, how long it takes for a decision to happen within the whole organization, is a strong indicator of organizational success and high function.
How fast Angela makes a decision is not the same thing. Decision latency is how long it takes from the moment someone needs a decision made, until the time it gets made.
The Futility of Self-Starters
One of the great ironies is that organizations like Angela's, small organizations that are doing exciting things with interesting clients, attract a lot of self starters. But these self starters can get penalized for not waiting.
Often, as the organization grows, the CEO like Angela feels increasingly concerned with its fragility; one thing going wrong may tip over the whole organization. So every decision must be performed optimally. Every decision.
But that's not what self-starters need. Self starters aren't perfect, and neither was Angela back when she first started the company. But her fear of fragility will cause her to be overly critical of an 80% correct solution, despite the fact that she made plenty of those years ago. The self-starters quickly learn that only the 100% Angela solution is acceptable.
She will have talent waiting in the wings for the moment when this changes, if it ever does. Or they will just move on and potentially prosper somewhere else.
Illumination As a Source of Change
I imagine you're reading this and thinking, "wow, something's gotta change here." Situations like this can be very resilient to change. For example, Angela will only change when she decides to change.
But the word blindness in this case suggests a solution that I've found to be incredibly effective: make visible the thing that people are not able to see.
In this case, one simple solution might be to implement a backlog for the agency, one that tracks all the decisions, reviews, etc. that are needed, most of which will poimted at Angela. But the list itself, assuming it gets used, will let everybody see what's really going on.
If you're building one of these lists, my suggestion is to gently put some color-coding in: decisions that have been waiting for three days or more, color them yellow. Decisions that have been waiting for more than five working days, color them red.
Things will change.
If this one hit close to home, let me know. Set up a quick chat or shoot me a note.
Or share it with an agency leader whose team is waiting on them right now.
Decision latency is a structure and process problem, which is the work I do. I’ve spent 15 years inside 200+ agencies helping leaders get decisions moving without them. If you suspect you’re the one with the queue, that’s worth a conversation. Tell me what you’re seeing — no pitch, no pressure.
For what happens to culture when a 15-person firm becomes 45, read Drift Happens.
