Tired of Being the Glue?
Build a Team That Works
Without You in the
Middle
Leading Teams is Hard Work
You’re probably the glue holding everything together, putting in hard work and care that often goes unnoticed.
And when you’ve become the glue, you’ve unintentionally become a bottleneck holding your team and business back.
Whether you’re a middle manager drowning in decisions and approvals or a CEO stuck in operations mode…
I’ll help you build a team that works without you in the middle.
When Teams Stall, Leaders Carry the Weight
Most teams work the ways they do because they’ve always done it that way, and they continue to do it even when it’s not serving them or the business.
As a result, decisions, approvals, information, and clarity start flowing through one person, creating a bottleneck.
With more than 50% of managers feeling burned out, and middle managers particularly affected, this isn’t sustainable.
But this isn’t a leadership problem.
It’s a design problem.
When You Redesign Your Ways of Working
Ownership Shifts to the Team
This shift is backed by research:
Teams that have clearly outlined decision-making methods are higher performing.
Decisions are made by the people closest to the work
Accountability becomes shared
Your team moves without waiting on you
Your calendar gets lighter
You can take vacation and progress doesn’t slow
Leaders get relief.
You can take a deep breath, and support your team instead of carrying everything yourself.
Teams feel energized.
They gain confidence, clarity, momentum, and ownership.
They stop asking for approval, second-guessing their decisions, or waiting to be told what to work on.
This is the Shift From Leader-Dependent to Team-Driven
A Better Way to Work and Lead
As the leader, your job isn’t to have all the answers.
Your job is to turn dependency into ownership.
To do that, teams need shared ways to:
Make the Invisible Visible, surfacing and aligning around what is and isn’t working
Intentionally Design Ways of Working without blowing things up
Move From Leader-Dependent to Team-Driven, so the collective team owns the work
That’s what the RIDE Framework was designed to help teams do. It’s a practical, team-led process for improving the ways your team works together.
RIDE helps teams move from friction to flow by running small, safe-to-try experiments that unlock immediate impact and long-term, sustainable change.
How I Help Organizations Transform
Teams don’t start by fixing everything at once because that never works!
Instead, we design and test strategic experiments to solve for real problems you’re experiencing, building momentum over time.
Depending on your needs, that might mean redesigning a staff meeting, clarifying decision rights, or experimenting with ways to remove a bottleneck.
Here’s what that looked like for Rob Papandrea, a senior manager at The Boeing Company.
Rob's experience reflects broader patterns in organizations: when leaders become decision-making bottlenecks, burnout follows.
But redesigning how work flows can restore both team effectiveness and leader wellbeing.
This shift doesn’t remove the leader.
It changes what leadership looks like.
Most Leaders Don’t Think of Themselves as Bottlenecks
They think of themselves as the glue.
The person who connects the dots, fills the gaps, and keeps things moving when work gets messy. That role exists for a reason, and it comes from good intent and necessity.
Still, it makes sense to want more sustainable and effective ways of working.
This work isn’t about removing leadership.
It’s about changing what leadership looks like so teams can own more of the work without things falling apart or leaders getting stuck in the middle.
If you’re ready to stop being the glue and redesign how work actually gets done, this might be for you.
