Bottleneck Dirty Webs

Leaders who try to scale by delegating everything end up creating "dirty webs"-tasks that span multiple teams but lack clear ownership or incentive to be efficient. Compliance checklists, onboarding steps, and software procurement often become these webs, inflating time waste and morale problems. By treating themselves as the bottleneck, leaders keep these processes small enough to understand and oversee, preventing them from ballooning into organizational debt.

The article shows how a seemingly harmless compliance request can snowball: a few approvals become a checklist managed by a mid-level employee with no oversight, draining engineering time. Onboarding suffers the same fate when new steps are added without a single point of accountability, leaving new hires to wade through outdated videos and pointless tasks. These patterns illustrate that without a clear owner, dirty work spreads, reduces productivity, and erodes morale.

The solution is to make the leader the final checkpoint for any dirty web. Insist that new compliance or onboarding processes are simple enough for the leader to execute, sign off on them personally, and periodically run through them to ensure they remain lean. This creates a cultural signal that toil is not inevitable and that unnecessary steps will be challenged. The leader's limited involvement when things run smoothly and decisive obstruction when they don't keeps the effort proportional to its value.

Adopting the bottleneck mindset means leaders stay close enough to the low-value work to prune it, without micromanaging every detail. It protects high-performing teams from hidden drains, improves morale, and reinforces a culture where unnecessary toil is actively removed rather than accepted as inevitable.