Why is everyone still waiting on me for everything?

Because you're still doing the mechanic's job, not the driver's. A driver sets the direction and lets someone else turn the wrenches. A mechanic gets called back in every time something needs fixing, no matter who's supposed to own it. If your team still routes the real decisions through you, the company runs on your personal bandwidth, and that's the actual reason nothing moves without you in the room.

The mechanic and the driver

People ask what I do. I tell them: I'm a mechanic. You bring the car in, you say it's broken, I run the diagnostic, I show you exactly what's wrong. You decide if you want it fixed. I don't drive for you. I don't own the car. I tell you what's broken and hand it back.

That's supposed to be the shape of your company too, once it's past the first stretch. You set the direction. Someone else turns the wrenches. But most founders I sit down with are still doing both jobs at once, and they've usually stopped noticing, because being needed for everything doesn't feel like a problem from the inside. It feels like being responsible.

What it looks like day to day

You're still the one who breaks the tie in the Slack thread. Signs off on the vendor everyone already agreed on. Gets pulled back into the hire you delegated three months ago. You still approve the invoice your ops lead could sign off on alone. You're cc'd on the thread you were supposed to be off of by last quarter.

None of these, on their own, look like a system failing. Each one looks like five minutes of your time, easily spared. The cost isn't any single decision. It's that your team has learned, correctly, that nothing is final until it passes through you, so they've stopped finishing things without you, which means you can never actually stop.

Why the handoff never happened

Handoffs stall for a specific, findable reason: a decision underneath the handoff was never actually made, so whoever inherited the task inherited the ambiguity too, and routed it back to the one person who could resolve it. Minh at Algomate is the clean version of this. He came in sure his execution was the problem, that he just needed to outreach harder. The real pattern was a niche decision he'd been avoiding, so every message he sent hedged, and every hour of outreach still needed his personal judgment call to go out the door. The niche decision wasn't a task he'd failed to delegate. It was the thing making delegation impossible.

That's usually what's underneath "everyone waits on me." Not a training gap, not a trust problem with the team. An unmade decision upstream, quietly requiring you to show up for every decision downstream of it.

The test

Pick one decision that landed on your desk this week that isn't actually yours to make. Don't make it. Hand it back with nothing but a deadline, and watch what happens.

If it gets made and holds, you were the bottleneck on that one decision, and now you're not. Good, do it again next week with a different one.

If it stalls and comes back to you anyway, even after you've handed it back cleanly, that's worth taking seriously. It usually means there's a decision one level up, the one you haven't made, that the small one was actually standing in for. That's a pattern worth naming properly, not guessing at.

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More on the person behind it: About Trung Nguyen · The offer: Founder Bottleneck Diagnostic · Related: How do I know if I'm the bottleneck in my company? · Why is nothing moving in my startup?