The Bottleneck at the Top – Get out of the Way for Business Growth

Why South African business leaders are the biggest obstacle to scaling, and what to do about it

75% of employees across sub-Saharan Africa are actively watching for or seeking a new job, the highest rate of any region in the world (Gallup, 2024)

Between 70% and 80% of South African small and medium enterprises fail within their first five years, with a lack of management capability consistently identified as one of the leading causes

Four things stand between a founder and a management team they can trust: Context, Clarity, Consequence and Courage

Most South African business leaders did not start their businesses to spend their days managing customer escalations, second-guessing their managers or doing work they thought they had delegated six months ago.

Yet this is exactly where many of them end up.

Research by Bateleur Brand Planning, conducted in 2023, found that only 53% of South African employees are genuinely engaged at work. Twenty per cent are actively disengaged. Meanwhile, Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report found that 75% of employees across sub-Saharan Africa are either watching for or actively seeking a new job. This is the highest proportion of any region in the world. South Africa sits in that region.

These are not unrelated figures. When leaders hold on to decisions that belong further down the organisation, the people beneath them disengage, and then leave before leadership realises what is happening.

When I explore this with my clients, the initial explanation is usually something about a lack of ownership or competence at team or middle management level. The real answer sits a level or two deeper than that. It is very, very hard for leaders, especially founders, to let go.

“But how can I?” is what I hear. “If I do nothing, nothing will get done, or it will be badly done.”

This outcome feels so existential to founders and their businesses that the leader becomes the bottleneck. The one person standing between the status quo and, in their mind, certain business failure. But also, the one person standing between the status quo and the very real possibility of scale.

The question I ask my clients is this: which risk can you honestly live with? The risk of things going wrong if you let go, or the risk of things never going right because you did not?

Most leaders, when they sit with that question honestly, already know the answer.

The work of letting go is a daily practice, not done once

The discomfort leaders have been avoiding is the daily work of choosing differently. Letting go is not a decision made once. It is a recommitment, often daily, to building a new execution structure. One that has not been tested yet.

So how do you start? Slowly.

When an organisation has been built around a very involved leader, stepping back suddenly will destabilise the whole system. The approach needs to be intentional, measured and collaborative.

Leadership development can feel like an art: intuitive, relational and hard to describe. It is also a science: analytical, objective and focused on measurable outcomes. Once you know what is missing, you know where to focus.

What is missing is usually one or more of four things: Context, Clarity, Consequence or Courage.

Context: do your managers know what game they are actually playing?

Every organisation operates in two layers of context at the same time. The first is internal: what is happening inside the business. The second is external: competitors, changing client profiles, rising costs, talent pressures and the particular economic headwinds facing every South African business right now.

Most of your team is not thinking about any of that. They are focused on the specifics of their own roles. How many support tickets have been closed, when to file the tax return, why this line of code is glitching. And for the most part, that is appropriate.

But when managers lack context, that is when plans go wrong.

Consider this: two urgent client support tickets arrive at the same time. One is straightforward. One is not. If the manager does not know that the difficult ticket belongs to a client with 100 users who is close to cancelling their contract, they may take the easy win and worsen an already fragile situation.

Context allows people to make better decisions by weighing up what actually matters. The more context your managers carry, the better the context they can pass to their teams. This creates a distributed decision network you can trust. Everyone has the information they need to make good choices, including knowing when to escalate. The leader no longer has to know and decide everything.

Clarity: are your managers translating strategy, or just relaying it?

Leaders can usually tell when clarity is the problem because the feedback they receive is that there is a “communication issue.” Managers are the Google Translate of business: they take big strategy and vision and convert it into actionable plans for their teams. When they are genuinely clear, they create clarity throughout the organisation.

When leaders invest real time in ensuring absolute clarity around the how, why, when and what of their strategy, the whole organisation works from the same map.

This is not easy. Good managers will challenge you with questions, opinions and information you did not know and sometimes do not want to hear. Getting to genuine clarity with your management team means being open and honest about what is happening in the business, including the problems and the opportunities.

For a leader who has been playing their cards close to their chest, this is uncomfortable. Letting go means letting people in.

Consequence: do your people understand what their work is actually worth?

People need to understand what happens when they do, or do not do, what is asked of them in the time agreed. This matters for two reasons.

First, it gives work meaning. When a developer knows that moving a button on the app will reduce the time it takes to send an order through for a client, that this lowers the likelihood of that client leaving, and that reducing churn by 5% is the company’s primary objective for the year, their individual task becomes connected to something larger. That connection matters. It drives ownership and care in a way that a task list never will. Managers need to fully understand the consequences that flow through the business so they can share them with their teams.

Second, it gives managers the authority to hold their teams accountable and to celebrate them. They can communicate the real impact of a mistake or a success, on the individual and on the business. Managers who understand consequences can bring their teams closer to the point where their work meets the reality of the customer, and this is where real engagement lives.

This is not a small matter in the South African context. Remchannel’s 2023 Salary and Wage Movements Survey, which analysed data from 64 organisations, found that nearly two thirds of senior managers who resigned had been with those organisations for five years or more. People who understand their impact and feel that their work matters are far less likely to be among them.

Courage: have you actually given your managers permission to lead?

Sometimes what managers need is not training or further development. It is permission.

Choosing what not to do is Peter Druker’s definition of strategy. It’s difficult and takes courage. Business leaders carry significant agency inside their businesses and are less likely to be moved out because of a bad choice. For leaders, courage is rewarded, failure isn’t personally fatal. It’s one of the reasons you can get things done. The others are because you have the mandate, the budget and the title. It is easy to forget that your managers do not have the same headroom by default.

Your managers need your backing, and it needs to be explicit. Not implied. Not assumed. The first step is to state clearly that you are mandating them to lead, and that you will support them when they do. They need you to back them with your mandate and agency to support them developing the courage to decide and act.

Great managers take risks every day. They have hard conversations with their people, negotiate with suppliers and clients, and make choices about what to prioritise. Without explicit support from the leader, the risk of reputational damage or career consequences for making a difficult call becomes very real. This leads to decision paralysis. Choosing becomes too risky, so everything gets escalated and eventually lands back on the leader’s desk.

You need to lend your agency to your managers. It is much easier to act with the weight of the leader behind you. Give them your courage till they develop their own.

The leader who steps back grows further

The truth is that leaders grow when they invest in their managers.

Research published in the Southern African Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management identifies a lack of managerial experience and skills as one of the primary reasons South African small and medium enterprises fail, with failure rates running between 60% and 80% in the first two years of trading. The businesses that scale are not the ones where the founder knew everything. They are the ones where the founder built up people who did.

When the four foundations are in place, the leader’s role evolves. You become a thinking partner, vision setter, context provider and orchestrator. The organisation gains what it needs to grow: a strong, motivated and capable management team that knows where it is going and why.

The leader who gets out of the way does not disappear.

They finally get to do the job they actually signed up for.

Sarah Rice has over 25 years of experience working with companies, inside companies and leading her own businesses. Her coaching work is built around the Scaling Management Teams programme, which gives middle managers the confidence, clarity and context they need to perform.

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Author: Sarah Rice from Angelfish Pr and Events on behalf of Grow.

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Bill Corcoran: Bill Corcoran is a South African journalist who has worked for The Star and The Sunday Times. He is known for
his reporting on business and finance.