Overrun
Level 4. Scores 76 to 100. A structure problem you are carrying personally.
You are well past what your calendar can carry. Your direct report count is above the band for your role by a wide margin, your contact hours take a large share of the week, or the layers between you and the work mean every decision arrives late and stripped of context. Often it is all three. This is the leader who says "every decision, including the daily schedule, comes back to me" and means it.
The first thing to know is that Overrun is not a performance problem. Leaders in this band are usually the strongest operators in the company, which is why the company keeps giving them more. It is a structure problem that the leader is absorbing personally, with their evenings and their health, and it will not fix itself because the structure has no reason to change while you keep carrying it.
The second thing is that your team already knows. People with an Overrun manager stop bringing things. Not because they do not trust you, but because they have learned that a question to you takes a week and a decision made without you takes a day, and they have started making the decisions without you. Some of those decisions are good. You do not know which.
Look at your hours per report. If it is under an hour a week, your reports are getting almost nothing from you and the organisation is paying a senior salary for a queue. If it is over three hours, you are running a team, not leading one, and there is no time left for the work only you can do.
A founder I worked with had every function in the company reporting to him, and his calendar was one on ones from morning to evening. He wanted to hire a COO to take half of them. I asked him to name one decision each of his people could make without him. He could not name one. That is not a span problem. It is an authority problem.
The first structural change was small. His most senior people each took a group of the others, with a written list of the decisions they now owned, handed over a slice at a time. He kept his own one on ones with the new leads, every other week. Within a few months the queue outside his door was gone, and the COO search was no longer urgent.
What to do this month, in order. First, stop taking on new reports; say the number out loud to whoever you report to. Second, name the layer: who on your team leads others already in practice, and make it formal. Third, list the decisions that come to you and hand down every one that is reversible, with a written threshold. Do those three before you try to improve any meeting.
If you have been Overrun for more than a year, check whether the cost has reached you. Take the leader burnout test; it is not a formality.
Next step: an Overrun span is what executive coaching most often starts with. What that costs and what it involves is on the executive coaching cost index.
Next step
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This is one of 4 results from the Span of Control Calculator, 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.