You know the situation all too well: there’s an action that isn’t moving or a decision that keeps getting deferred. Even an email sitting in their inbox that you drafted, pre-approved, and practically gift-wrapped - and it still hasn’t been sent.
Meanwhile, your inbox is filling up with polite variations of the same question. “Any update on X?” “Just circling back on Y.” “Completely understand if Z is still being worked through.”
You understand what’s happening because this isn’t the first time. You can see the inbox; you know the decision has been sitting there for two weeks. You are, by this point, fluent in the gap between what’s on the action log and what’s actually going to happen.
The bottleneck is your exec, and everyone knows it except them.
First: how to spot it
Not every delay is an exec problem, so it’s worth being clear about the pattern before you name it to yourself.
The tell-tale signs are specific. The same items recycle on the weekly action log with no status change - not because the work is hard, but because a decision hasn’t been made. Decisions keep getting bumped to “after the board meeting” or “once the restructure settles” or some other event on the horizon that moves forward each week. Stakeholders who used to escalate directly to your exec now come to you first, because they’ve learned that’s more likely to get traction.
There’s also a subtler version: the pre-read that got sent, the recommendation that was “noted”, the strategy doc that’s been through three rounds of input and still hasn’t had a decision made on it. No one’s blocking it - it’s just... sitting there.
The decisions don’t stop being needed just because they’re uncomfortable to make. They just pile up - and you end up managing the pile.
These aren’t performance issues. They’re usually a symptom of an exec who is overloaded, conflict-averse, or genuinely uncertain about the right call. That doesn’t make it less of a problem. It makes it a different kind of problem - one that requires a different approach than just following up more loudly.
The trap you’re probably already in
Here’s what most EAs do when they spot this pattern: they absorb it.
They field the stakeholder messages, promising a response. They buy time with carefully worded non-answers. They soften the delay into something that sounds like a considered pause rather than a blocked decision. They protect their exec from the consequences of the delay - because that’s what good support looks like, right?
Except it isn’t, because you are unwittingly making it worse.
When you become the buffer between your exec and the friction their delay is causing, you’re not helping them - you’re insulating them from a signal that would prompt them to change. The stakeholder stops escalating because you’ve managed it. The deadline passes with no action. The consequence never quite lands, and so the pattern continues on and on.
You become the reason they don’t feel it, and then you wonder why nothing changes.
This isn’t about blame. It’s about recognising that absorbing the impact of someone else’s bottleneck is not neutral. It has a cost - to the business, to the people waiting, and eventually to you.
What you actually do about it
There are three moves worth having in your toolkit - and they work best used in sequence rather than as a grab-bag.
