Most operational content covers problems someone already solved. This month, COO Alliance members named the operational bottleneck slowing them down right now and what they had already tried without success.

Bottlenecks Rarely Look Like Bottlenecks

One COO described a fast scaling company held back by the owner’s discomfort with what talent costs. That discomfort led to under-hiring for every open role.

The pattern left good people in the wrong scope and the same need still open. The COO’s takeaway: under-hiring costs more than hiring right the first time.

Another member watched strong individual contributors struggle after they moved into director roles. Interesting problems kept pulling them away from the unglamorous work of building repeatable systems.

A third faced a macro environment that squeezed cash flow and team motivation, something no COO can fix directly. Discipline and creativity became the only response available.

The Capacity At The Judgment Layer

One COO named the constraint as capacity at the judgment layer. A small group of people made every decision in his company, yet execution work kept eating their week.

He tried hiring to backfill, which added headcount without separating the two kinds of work. Documenting processes did not help either, since the same people still ran them.

What Solved It

What worked was splitting judgment from repeatable execution and building dedicated capacity around the execution side.

• Build execution capacity separate from the decision makers
• Stop routing routine work through your best judgment calls
• Ask whether your constraint is capacity or the wrong person doing the work

Two members separately cited Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal and the Theory of Constraints as foundational reading on how bottlenecks work.

Bottom Line

The bottlenecks these COOs named were organizational more than technical. Systems and processes matter, and the constraint usually sits with a person or a judgment call.

Cameron Herold founded COO Alliance as a global membership organization for COOs and second in command executives, built around conversations like this one. Explore membership at cooalliance.com.