Becoming a Better Leader Part 3: Enabling Flow and Removing Obstacles

In today’s fast-paced organizations, a leader’s key role is enabling teams to deliver value efficiently and effectively. This means understanding and optimizing flow—the smooth movement of work through the system—while systematically removing obstacles that get in the way.

Understanding Flow in Modern Organizations 

As Dominica DeGrandis, author of Making Work Visible, explains, organizations often struggle with disconnected silos, bureaucratic processes, and competing priorities that impede flow. The VP of Sales promises features to customers without understanding technical constraints. Development teams get blocked waiting for decisions. Quality suffers as teams rush to meet arbitrary deadlines. This is also confirmed by Steve Periera and Andrew Davis in the book Flow Engineering.

These challenges can’t be solved through command and control leadership. Instead, leaders need to focus on understanding and improving the system of work.

The Bureaucracy Paradox

As Mark Schwartz explains in The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy, organizations need some structure to enable flow, but too much bureaucracy creates impediments. The key is distinguishing between “enabling bureaucracy,” which creates guardrails for fast flow, and “blocking bureaucracy,” which simply adds friction. For example, automated compliance checks can actually speed up work by catching issues early, while manual approval processes often just create delays.

Measuring What Matters

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. There are several key metrics, as outlined by DeGrandis, Pereira, and Davis, for understanding flow. 

• Flow Time measures how long work takes from start to finish, giving visibility into the actual speed of delivery. 
• Flow Velocity shows how many items are completed over time, helping gauge team capacity. 
• Flow Efficiency reveals the ratio of active work time versus wait time, often exposing surprising bottlenecks in the process.
• Flow Distribution shows the balance of different types of work.
• Flow Load shows the total amount of work in progress. 

These metrics help leaders identify where work gets stuck and what’s really causing delays. For example, as outlined in Flow Engineering, one insurance company discovered their biggest bottleneck wasn’t in development but in business decision-making and approvals.

Creating Clarity

According to Gene Kim and Dr. Steven J. Spear in Wiring the Winning Organization, one of a leader’s most important jobs is creating clarity in the organization. Teams need crystal clear understanding of goals and priorities—what they’re trying to achieve and why. They need to understand constraints and dependencies—how their work connects to and impacts others. And they need clarity around decision rights—who can make which decisions without requiring escalation.

Without this clarity, teams waste time and energy on confusion, conflicts, and rework. Leaders must actively work to provide this clarity through consistent communication and transparent decision-making processes.

Removing Obstacles

Once you understand where work is getting stuck, the next step is to systematically remove obstacles. This often means addressing structural issues like streamlining approval processes or reducing handoffs between teams. It requires improving communication by making work visible and creating strong feedback loops. And it means building capability through training, coaching, and investments in tools and automation.

When addressing structural impediments, it’s important to recognize that not all processes and bureaucracy are bad. As Schwartz observes in War and Peace and IT, the goal isn’t to eliminate structure entirely but to make it “lean, learning, and enabling.” This means:

• Automating controls where possible
• Building compliance into processes rather than adding it after
• Creating clear “guardrails” that enable teams to move quickly within defined boundaries
• Continuously evolving processes based on feedback

This aligns with what Schwartz calls “adaptive bureaucracy”—processes that evolve based on learning rather than remaining rigid. When teams encounter obstacles, the focus should be on improving the system rather than simply working around it.

The Power of Small Steps

The guidance paper “Winning Together” emphasizes that improvements don’t have to be big-bang transformations. Small incremental changes can often have dramatic impacts when focused on the right areas.

The AA.com team at American Airlines provides a powerful example in the paper. They started with a seemingly impossible goal: deploying code changes within an hour. Rather than attempting a massive reorganization, they tackled one constraint at a time. Over a year, they eliminated manual processes, integrated testing, and automated deployments. The result? Deployment times dropped dramatically, quality improved, and team morale soared.

Creating a Learning System

As we found in last month’s series on building a learning culture, high performance requires more than just removing immediate obstacles. Leaders need to create systems that enable continuous learning and improvement.

This means making it safe to experiment and try new approaches. It means building in time for reflection and learning from both successes and failures. Most importantly, it means creating mechanisms to share learning across teams so improvements can spread throughout the organization.

Moving to Action

As a leader, start by measuring the flow metrics in your organization. Look for patterns in where work gets stuck. Map your value streams to understand how work actually flows through your organization. Identify your biggest constraint—where work most often gets blocked—and focus improvement efforts there first.

Create regular forums for teams to surface obstacles and work together on removing them. But remember—your job isn’t to solve every problem yourself. Instead, create the conditions where teams can solve problems and deliver value effectively.

Examine your processes and controls—are they truly enabling flow or creating unnecessary friction?

Look for opportunities to automate compliance and controls.

Create mechanisms to evolve processes based on learning.

Next In The Series

In our final post of this series, we’ll explore how to grow leadership capabilities throughout your organization. After all, enabling flow isn’t just about what you do as a leader—it’s about building an organization full of leaders who can continue improving the system.

Remember: Your job as a leader isn’t to have all the answers. It’s to create the conditions where teams can solve problems and deliver value effectively.

- About The Authors

Leah Brown

Managing Editor at IT Revolution working on publishing books and guidance papers for the modern business leader. I also oversee the production of the IT Revolution blog, combining the best of responsible, human-centered content with the assistance of AI tools.

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