Managing a bottleneck team

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2024-06-09 19:00:05

One of the harder situations you might find yourself in is managing a bottleneck team. What is a bottleneck team? When other teams can’t get their work done unless you do something for them, you’re a bottleneck team.

If you’re a bottleneck team, you’re always overloaded. There will be many important initiatives that ultimately depend on your team to be successful. And there will be talented, influential leaders with big titles that view their success in terms of getting their priorities to happen.

There are usually a couple of bottleneck teams in any sufficiently large organization. You could say that that’s just true by definition. The theory of constraints basically says there’s always a single constraint in your system. By dealing with that constraint, you make your whole system more efficient.

I usually find a couple of places where all of the key projects funnel through. These teams are usually stressful, challenging places to be.