You hold the calls and you are not in the room. Decisions above a small threshold come to you, your team checks with you before they commit to anything outside the team, and at least one thing waits when you are away. Meanwhile you are not in the working sessions and you talk to your people mostly in the one on one.
Here is what it costs. Your calendar is your team's bottleneck. Work flows until it reaches a decision, then it queues. Your people learn to batch questions for the next time they can get you, which means every small call takes a week, and they learn to guess what you would say, which is worse, because they guess conservatively. From inside, this feels like being asked too much. From outside, it looks like a team that cannot move without permission.
The Gatekeeper style is common at director level and above, where the leader has stepped out of the work and kept the decisions, usually because the decisions feel like the job.
Look at your Decisions bar first. If it is your highest, the fix is not to make decisions faster. It is to make fewer of them. Most of what reaches you is reversible, and reversible calls belong to the person closest to the work, with a threshold you have written down.
The test I use is one question: if this goes wrong, can we walk it back within a week at a cost nobody outside the team would notice? If yes, it is a reversible door, and it belongs to the person closest to the work. If no, it is yours.
That means hiring or removing a leader, anything that commits the company for more than a quarter, a price that goes to a customer, and anything with your name on a contract. Keep those. Hand down the rest, and slice a little more authority down every quarter. Most leaders I work with find that the list they have to keep is short. The list they have been keeping is long.
One change for this week. Write down the three kinds of decision your team can make without you, with a number where a number helps. Tell them. Then, when the next one comes to you anyway, send it back with the sentence "this is yours, tell me what you decided".
If your Contact bar is very low, there is a second issue. Gatekeepers often know the plan and not the people. One working session a week, in the room, listening, will tell you more than a month of one on ones.
Next step: if you suspect your calendar is the constraint on the whole company, check it at the bottleneck diagnostic or size it with the span of control calculator.
Your people see this pattern from the other chair. The micromanaging boss test and the boss pattern test ask about it from a report's side. Take one about your own manager, then ask how your people would answer it about you.
Next step
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This is one of 4 results from the Management Style Quiz, a free tool that shows the score without an email. Aggregate figures are at the statistics page once 30 completions have been reached. More free tools are at the tools shelf.