Bottleneck Dirty Webs
Delegation, specialization, and federation are critical to scaling companies. But scaling doesn’t mean stepping back from everything. Especially for unsavory, cross-functional, time intensive tasks, leaders should position themselves as bottlenecks - owners that feel pressure when the work grows too much, forcing them to find ways to push back on the growth in time and effort.
Under the umbrella of Dirty Work, there is a particular subset which we’ll brand Dirty Webs. A Dirty Web is dirty work that is shared across multiple teams.
Dirty Webs are often owned by a team in charge of completing the task but not directly incentivized to complete the task extremely well. In the worst cases they may even be incentivized to not make the work be more efficient - reducing the work reduces the need for their role.
For example, leaders defer onboarding ownership to another team. Now those leaders have to risk having friction with someone both more junior than them and not in their reporting chain if they want to provide oversight. So they don’t.
