The symptom
Consider an organisation where a manager is available to his team at all hours and responds quickly regardless of the time. The instinctive reading, particularly once an organisation has grown, is to worry: is the team becoming dependent on him in a way that will not scale? Is his availability a sign that decisions are not being made lower down? The concern is reasonable on its face — constant availability is exactly the kind of behaviour that, in a different team, might well indicate exactly that.
What leaders usually conclude
The pattern-matching here is understandable, because constant availability is a known symptom of an unhealthy dependency in many organisations, particularly ones that have outgrown their original decision-making habits. The natural move is to search for evidence of that dependency and, having gone looking, to expect to find it — treating the search itself as close to a formality, since the underlying assumption already feels settled before any evidence has actually been examined.
What the evidence suggests
In this case, the search comes back empty. The team’s decision quality and independence are in line with comparable teams elsewhere in the organisation. Escalation volumes are normal — not elevated, as would be expected if the team routinely deferred decisions upward rather than making them. Two team members independently describe his availability as the reason they can move quickly, not as a substitute for their own judgement. This is worth dwelling on: the counterfactual test — do people make their own calls, or do they wait — is a more reliable signal than availability itself, and it is the test that most casual assessments of “is this person a bottleneck” skip in favour of simply noting how often the manager is reachable.
The obvious reading, in other words, turns out to be accurate. Constant availability is sometimes simply good management, and a search for a hidden dependency can legitimately find none. This matters because it is easy for an evidence-led perspective to overcorrect toward always finding a deeper structural explanation — but the deeper explanation is not always there, and treating every instance of a pattern as automatically suspicious is its own kind of misdiagnosis, one that risks discouraging a genuinely effective manager from a habit that is currently serving the team well.
What is worth examining is not whether this particular manager is a bottleneck today, but what happens to the same behaviour under different conditions. Larry Greiner’s account of organisational growth phases describes delegation crises as a recurring feature of scale: practices that work at one size — including a manager’s personal availability substituting for distributed decision authority — become constraints once the organisation grows past the point where one person’s attention can reasonably reach everyone who needs it. The crisis, in his account, is rarely announced in advance; the same behaviour that generated real value at one size simply stops being physically possible to sustain at the next, often abruptly rather than gradually.
Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko’s research on decision bottlenecks, based on a Bain survey of executives at more than 350 companies, adds a related point: decision-making stalls disproportionately at specific structural seams, including where too much depends on a single point of contact. A manager whose availability currently functions as connective tissue between a small team and the rest of the organisation is, in effect, standing in for a seam that has not yet been given a formal structure of its own. That arrangement can work well for a long time. It also means the seam has exactly one person’s capacity behind it, which is a fact worth knowing even when nothing is currently going wrong.
Why doubling in size changes the calculation
Here is the distinction worth making explicit: nothing about this manager’s behaviour needs to change for the same behaviour to become a genuine constraint later. If the team he leads doubles, or if his own scope expands to cover more people than any one person can meaningfully stay available to, the identical habit that currently functions as good management could become the exact bottleneck the original assumption suspected. The evidence at any single point in time can be entirely reassuring and still not answer the more useful question — which is about capacity at scale, not about current dependency.
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Questions worth considering
- Where is the line between responsive leadership and a team that has quietly stopped proceeding without a specific person?
- If this manager’s team or scope doubled, would the same level of availability still be physically possible — and if not, what would take its place?
- Is escalation volume being tracked anywhere, or is “the team seems fine” the only evidence currently available?
- Would the same conclusion hold if this manager were unexpectedly unavailable for a month — or has that never actually been tested?
- Does the organisation distinguish, in any systematic way, between availability that enables a team and availability that quietly substitutes for its judgement?
This perspective is part of Leadership.
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