Delegation, specialization, and federation are critical to scaling companies. But scaling doesn’t mean stepping back from everything. Especially for unsavory, cross-functional, time intensive tasks, leaders should position themselves as bottlenecks - owners that feel pressure when the work grows too much, forcing them to find ways to push back on the growth in time and effort.
Dirty Webs
Dirty Work is the tedious, unglamorous, necessary, tasks that quietly pile up in organizations.
Under the umbrella of Dirty Work, there is a particular subset which we’ll brand Dirty Webs. A Dirty Web is dirty work that is shared across multiple teams.
Dirty Webs are often owned by a team in charge of completing the task but not directly incentivized to complete the task extremely well. In the worst cases they may even be incentivized to not make the work be more efficient - reducing the work reduces the need for their role.
Dirty Webs often include: compliance, incident follow-ups, onboarding checklists, software procurement.
Too often, leaders hand off dirty work to other teams that hire, delegate, and forget the dirty work, creating dirty webs.
Dirty Webs are insidious because they are shared across teams.
For example, leaders defer onboarding ownership to another team. Now those leaders have to risk having friction with someone both more junior than them and not in their reporting chain if they want to provide oversight. So they don’t.
What happens instead is that dirty webs grow unbounded. They become a creeping organizational debt. And when that dirty web starts to slow things down, you’ve officially lost control.
Examples of Dirty Webs
Take compliance. It starts small—maybe a couple of approvals or audits. Somebody asks you if it’s ok to involve your team in the process. Sure, why not? You figure if it becomes a problem someone will escalate. Then, one day, you wake up to find your team buried in checklists, forms, and deadlines devised by a mid-level, under-performing new guy on a different team. Upon inspection you realize it’s a nightmare. You ask people how could this be. I don’t know, they say. Not my job. Shrug. You have $8M of engineering headcount wasting 1% of their time on a process created by a mid-level employee with no oversight.
Onboarding? Same thing. Everyone keeps adding “just one more thing,” and before you know it, new hires are spending their first week watching outdated videos and completing tasks no one remembers the purpose of.
These aren’t isolated examples. They’re patterns. And if leaders don’t step in, dirty webs metastasize into sprawling, morale-killing messes.
Be the Bottleneck
Leaders need to be the bottleneck for dirty webs.
One of the most valuable things a leader can do is look at potential dirty webs and say, “This needs to stay small and simple enough that I can understand and oversee it.” If you don’t, who will? No one else has the perspective—or the authority—to keep complexity in check.
You must be a bottleneck for badness.
This is like founder mode, but not quite the same. Founder mode is about doing super high leverage things and keeping close to the most important stuff. This is different. Operating as a badness bottleneck is about strategically positioning yourself to suffocate creeping toil in your organization, ensuring the dirty webs stay manageable and the system doesn’t collapse under its own weight. When done right, a dirty web is not the most important thing because you’re keeping it unimportant.
When a new compliance process is proposed, insist it’s simple enough that you know how to do it. Insist any new compliance requirements are signed off on by you. Push back on unnecessary steps. Redefine what “good enough” looks like. Actually do the compliance steps yourself once a year to make sure they’re not a total time waste.
Onboarding? Same story. Insist on having visibility into any new onboarding steps being added, no matter where in the company it comes from. Be the person who asks, “Does this make sense?” or “Why are we doing this?” It’s not glamorous work, but it’s critical. Beyond saving time, reducing toil also has other benefits:
- It’s a morale improver for the most valuable team members because high output doers hate toil disproportionately more
- It sets the right cultural precedent that toil both can be and should be removed – people often just accept toil, or think that it’s not their place to remove it, and this breaks that pattern
Too often leaders delegate and forget. Being a Dirty Web bottleneck doesn’t mean you’re involved in every decision of a process, it means that you have some recurring oversight of the things that take up your team’s time. It means you position yourself to have little involvement if things are sustainable, but you become a significant obstruction if things become more time-intensive.
A Call to Action
Own the dirty webs. Fight to keep them small, manageable, and in your control.
Because if you’re not bottlenecking the mess, you’re letting it spread. And no one else is going to stop it.
Be the bottleneck.