Blog

A growing SME business should feel fast...Close enough to the customer to move quickly, small enough to stay aligned and agile, big enough to have real management depth.

But in plenty of growing UK firms, the opposite happens: the senior team becomes the system. Everything routes upward. Decisions queue. The Director becomes the default answer.

This is the experience of one Senior Manager (let’s call her Sarah, obviously not her real name) in a fast-growing business where she and most of the Directors had become the bottleneck, and what changed when the leadership team used the Jonico Window–Self assessment to make their habits visible.

The situation: “We’re trusted… until it matters”

On paper, the business was doing well. Strong product. Strong sales. A decent leadership team. But the day-to-day experience for managers was oddly constricted.

Sarah ran a team of eight across operations and customer delivery. She was capable, experienced, and respected. Yet her typical week almost always feeling like a constant negotiation with her director.

Not because the Director was a bad leader. Quite the opposite: smart, hardworking, and deeply committed. The problem was that the Director had quietly, without realising, trained others to depend on them.

What Sarah’s days actually looked like

Monday: Sarah’s team meeting was full of sensible decisions that couldn’t quite be made.

• “Can we change the onboarding process?”
• “Can we offer a goodwill credit in this case?”
• “Can we prioritise this customer segment?”

Each question ended with the same phrase: “We’ll need to check with my Director.”

By 11am, Sarah had a list of ten items to escalate. None were catastrophic. All were important enough to feel risky.

Tuesday: The Director’s calendar was a wall of meetings. Sarah caught them between calls.

• The Director answered quickly, but with caveats.
• Sarah left with partial clarity.
• The team still didn’t know where the boundary was.

So Sarah did what most good managers do in that situation: she protected the business. She slowed things down.

Wednesday: A customer issue flared. Sarah could have handled it, but it touched pricing and precedent.

She escalated. The Director jumped in, solved it, and moved on.

The customer was happy. The team was relieved. And a subtle message landed: when it really matters, it goes up.

Thursday: Sarah spent half her day writing updates for the Director: context, options, risks, recommendations.

It was good thinking work - but it wasn’t the work she was hired to do.

Friday: The senior team meeting was a familiar loop.

• The Director complained about firefighting.
• Managers complained about waiting.
• Everyone agreed they needed to “delegate more”.

And then Monday arrived, and the series of events repeated themselves.

The symptoms: bottlenecking disguised as care

From Sarah’s perspective, the bottleneck had three visible symptoms:

• Decisions queued at the top. Even routine calls became “Director decisions” through habit.
• Inconsistent empowerment. Managers felt trusted right up until something had consequences.
• Rescuing behaviour. When pressure rose, senior leaders stepped in which solved today’s problem and created tomorrow’s dependency.

The most frustrating part was that nobody was trying to create this. Each person believed they were doing the right thing.

• The Director thought they were being responsible.
• Senior managers thought they were being safe.
• Everyone thought they were protecting standards.

Collectively, they had built a system where accountability was unclear and empowerment was conditional.

The turning point: a different kind of leadership conversation

The business brought the senior team together for a leadership workshop built around Jonico Window–Self.

The framing was important: this wasn’t about “fixing” managers or blaming the Director. It was about making leadership patterns visible and then choosing better ones.

Before the session, each senior manager completed the Jonico self-scoring questionnaire with one explicit assumption: your people are capable.

That assumption alone created a useful tension. If your team is capable, then what’s driving the bottleneck?

What the Jonico assessment surfaced (without the drama)

Sarah expected the usual: “delegate more”, “trust your people”, “empowerment matters”.

What she didn’t expect was how precisely the Jonico Window helped the team name their patterns.

Two unhelpful styles showed up clearly:

• The mistrustful meddler: high involvement, low empowerment. Always in the detail, always “helping”, but quietly removing ownership.
• The remote abdicator: low involvement, high risk. Hands off until something goes wrong, then surprised when it does.

The uncomfortable insight for the Director wasn’t that they were controlling. It was that their involvement didn’t consistently translate into empowerment.

And for Sarah, the insight wasn’t that she lacked confidence. It was that she had become a skilled escalator; great at packaging decisions upward, less practised at holding decision rights in her own team.

The behavioural shifts: small agreements that changed the system

The team didn’t leave with a 40-page leadership manifesto. They left with a few practical commitments.

1) A simple delegation flow

They agreed a repeatable delegation “flow” for any meaningful piece of work:

1.       Outcome: What does “good” look like?
2.       Boundaries: What must stay true (budget, brand, legal, customer promises)?
3.       Check-in rhythm: When do we review progress (and when do we not)?
4.       Decision rights: What can be decided at manager level vs Director level?

This sounds basic. It is. And it’s exactly what had been missing.

2) Directors stopped rescuing and started coaching

The Director and one other senior leader made a deliberate change: when managers escalated, they didn’t immediately solve.

They asked better questions:

• “What decision are you recommending?”
• “What options have you ruled out, and why?”
• “What would you do if I wasn’t available?”

And then they held the line. If the decision belonged at manager level, it stayed there.

3) Sarah changed how she led her own team

Sarah realised she’d been unintentionally training her team to escalate to her, the same way she escalated to the Director.

So, she changed two habits:

• She stopped being the “answer machine” and became the “thinking partner”.
• She made decision rights explicit in her team: who owns this, and what does ownership include?

The results: speed, clarity, and a calmer senior team

Over the next 6–10 weeks, the business saw changes that were obvious in the day-to-day.

What changed for Sarah

• Fewer escalations. Her list of “Director questions” shrank dramatically.
• Faster decisions. Work moved in days, not weeks.
• More capable managers. Her team began bringing solutions, not problems.

Most importantly, Sarah felt like a Senior Manager again not a professional messenger between the front line and the top.

What changed in the business

• Routine issues stopped reaching the Director. Not because people cared less, but because decision rights were clearer.
• Accountability improved across functions. Less friction, fewer “I thought you were doing it” moments.
• Senior leaders regained capacity for strategy. The Director’s week had space for customer conversations, planning, and (genuinely) a lunch break.

Why it worked: it wasn’t “delegate more” - it was “see your style”

Most leadership teams already know delegation matters. The problem is that knowledge doesn’t change behaviour under pressure.

Jonico worked here because it gave the team:

• A structured way to see their default leadership style
• A shared language to talk about patterns without blame
• Practical agreements that changed the system, not just individual intent

In a growing business, bottlenecks don’t happen because people aren’t working hard. They happen because leadership habits don’t evolve at the same pace as the organisation.

Tools like Jonico make those habits visible - and once something is visible, you can finally do something about it.

If this feels familiar

If you’re supporting a senior team in a scaling organisation, here’s the takeaway: you don’t scale by cloning the founders. You scale by building leaders who can coach, enable, and hold clear decision rights.

If you want to explore what a Jonico Window–Self workshop could look like for your team, I’m happy to share a simple outline and the pre-work that makes it land. Just drop us a message here: Contact Us