When a leader becomes the bottleneck of decision making, it’s bad news for the team … 

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You're in a meeting with your team.

“So what should we do about it?” Suddenly, all eyes are on you.

You're in a crucial phase of the project.

The team is proud as hell of the first prototype.

But there are still a lot of things to sort out and quite

a few ideas down the road.

Taylor's issue is a particularly tricky one . It's affected by a lot

of parameters and in turn affects most of the other team members.

You're the leader and you're faced with a difficult decision.

There are so many things to consider, so many options to choose

from, so many paths to follow.

But which one should you choose?

It gets worse.

Because this is just for Taylor's part.

Martin has basically the same question.

Sarah as well.

Alex and Kim, too.

This is when you realize you've made yourself the bottleneck of your team.

By overseeing every decision so that the project remains focused on

your common goal, you've basically overwhelmed yourself with decisions,

slowed down the team and resolved, and made yourself the root of

quite some frustration in the team.

This is why it's so important to adopt a lighting the path approach as a leader.

When everyone walks along the same path in the same direction and knows why we're

going there as a team, you can trust your team with making the right decisions.

For this to work, it's often much more useful to ask them

the right questions rather than pretend to have all the answers.