5 Ways to Build a Team That Can Say Yes Without You

Craig Groeschel (0:06)

Hey, it's great to have you back for another episode of the Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast. I'm going to value your time. We're going to get right into it. I got a question for you.

What if I told you that your best people are often waiting on you?

Not because they lack talent, not because they lack initiative, but because somewhere along the way, without even knowing it, you've trained them to wait. The truth is right now, somewhere in your organization, there's probably somebody who knows what to do, but they're waiting on permission from you.

And this wait, if they are waiting, is costing you way more than you actually probably realize. Now, the last episode, we called this problem the permission bottleneck. I'll give you the definition again, then we're going to look at new content. What is the permission on bottleneck? It exists whenever people who could move the mission forward are waiting for someone else's permission to do it. And we all have these bottlenecks. The problem is the longer they wait, the more that the mission tends to slow down. Now, there's the one question that changes everything. We asked it last month. Let's ask it again. The question is this.

How deep into your organization are people empowered to say yes without having to ask permission first? How deep into the organization can someone say that's a great idea? Let's do it instead of needing approval from someone higher in the organization. And the key thought is this. Where yes lives determines how fast your mission moves forward. So what we're going to do today is we're going to look at five practical ways that you can push yes deeper into your organization. And we're not just going to identify the bottleneck, but we're going to try to remove it so your best people can stop waiting and start leading. So the first thing we need to do is find it. Before we can fix the bottleneck, you have to discover where it is. And the challenge is, is this rarely obvious because oftentimes it kind of hides buried in systems or in habits or in approvals that no one questions anymore. It's just kind of always been that way. So how do you find where the bottlenecks are? I'm going to give you two questions.

First question is this, what team or department are we waiting most often on? What team or department, maybe even person, are we waiting on over and over again? Second question is, where do good ideas slow down? You have a good idea, you try to implement it, and somewhere in your organization, those ideas tend to slow. I want you to think about it, maybe even talk about it with your team and identify where momentum slows most often. So if you want to break the bottleneck, don't just think about breaking it, don't just think about tweaks. I want you to think about like a breakthrough. In other words, we're not just going to tweak something by 2% or 5%, what you might do is say, hey, we want to do twice as much in half the time. That's a breakthrough. And if you're going to try to do twice as much in half the time, wherever this breaks down first, that's probably your bottleneck.

Whenever you start to see or think this could be a bottleneck, don't make excuses for it, don't explain it away, acknowledge it, follow it, so you can fix it even if you're the bottleneck. And the reality is this, like you don't need a crisis or some big problem to find the bottleneck. If you just start increasing the pressure, the bottleneck tends to reveal itself.

I'll give you an example where I was the bottleneck.

Our church on the weekend, it starts long before church starts. In other words, my portion, what I do starts about two and a half to three hours before the service starts. About 10 years in, to lead in the church, I was still obsessed about overseeing the chair formation. In other words, they would move the chairs during the week, and I wanted to be just right. And the reason is because I care a lot and because I'm pretty good at it. And I know how to have the right spacing, so it feels warm, too close, and it doesn't feel right too far away. It feels wrong if the chairs aren't rounded. It feels colder.

If the distance is too much, people don't know how to relate to each other. And so the whole team would wait on me to come out and say, move that one here and move this one there. We're literally 10 years in, and I'm overseeing the way we set up chairs. They're waiting on me and I'm the bottleneck.