Why chasing 100% capacity is a crucial mistake

And why accepting idle time is the key to increasing your team’s output

Part of The Intentional Leadership Arc, a series on leadership published every Sunday in The Intentional Manager.

The Intentional Manager — strategy, leadership and execution for the professional who wants to lead with intention, not just effort.

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“Working at 100% capacity” is among the most baffling corporate fixations.

Managers chase it to justify asking for more resources. Employees crave it because doing more is how they get promoted and (maybe) not executed during the next mass-firing. Everybody is busy and efficient.

Then something unexpected happens, no one can deal with it, it becomes urgent and eventually an heroic firefighter solves it.

The irony? Most of that work is, by definition, unnecessary.

As is the firefighting for which you missed dinner with your spouse last night.

Below I will demonstrate why this is so and what, as a manager, to do differently to increase your team’s output.

What is a bottleneck?

If you imagine a pipe with water flowing in, there will be places where water slows down.

The bottleneck is where it slows down the MOST.

For each pipe, the number of bottlenecks is, by definition, ONE.

Implications for the whole process

A pipe can only carry as much water as its bottleneck.

If the maximum outflow of your faucet is 1l, pushing 100l or 1,000l or 10,000l down the pipe is an exercise in futility: your faucet will still spout 1l.

Conversely, if your 1l faucet functions at half-capacity, at 0.5l, the whole pipe will carry 0.5l.

While the faucet runs at full speed, at 1l, the rest of the pipe will always have spare capacity.

How does this apply to corporate?

A process is a pipe for work to flow through, with a bottleneck that limits how fast work can flow.

The bottleneck is a specific person or function and the process moves, at most, at its speed; if it slows down, so does everything else. Within that process, most people (in fact, all the non-bottleneck people) have free time, while they wait for the bottleneck to process its piece.

Corporate culture, however, condemns idle employees and incentivizes well-meaning managers to make one of three decisions.

Launching efficiency initiatives, where the team works to speed up its piece of the process. Sensible, but useless: you can improve things to your heart’s content, but, if not in direct service to the bottleneck, the overall process will move just as slow.

Launching quality initiatives, where the team raises the quality of its piece of the process. Again - sensible, but improvements should be driven by customers, not spare capacity; else, they only raise costs and shrink margins.

Launching side projects, where the team does things unrelated to the process it was hired to support. While these can be fun and interesting, there’s a reason they are considered “nice-to-have”.

If your team works on non-bottleneck parts of a process and is always busy, watch out: non-bottlenecks always have, BY DEFINITION, more capacity than the process needs and so, if full, they are working on irrelevant stuff.

What do you do then?

You choose to allow idle time because you realize it is needed to have the bottleneck - and therefore the process - work at full steam.

Then you design your team’s work to support the bottleneck in working as fast as possible; if an initiative serves any other purpose, you kill it.

If your team is already buried and you can’t back off, at least prepare yourself to drop everything as soon as the bottleneck calls for aid.

Marketing - example

You lead a marketing team built to support sales with marketing material, social media and conferences.

Everything else - internal communication, patient advocacy, market analysis and segmentation - is out of scope by design.

You are working with an external agency on a marketing campaign to launch a new product:

1. Input by you

2. Proposal by agency

3. Review by you

4. Re-work by agency

5. Deployment

The bottleneck in the process is the agency, because it has multiple customers and everything you ask takes weeks.

What happens in reality

You want the development process to go fast, but waiting for the agency takes time and you refuse to stay idle.

So you ask your team to take on more projects and use the spare capacity: you help HR with an internal communication, you review the Leadership Team slides for the investors, you commit to supporting a local sales team for an important event.

The agency comes on Tuesday with questions, but you don’t have time and respond on Monday: the bottleneck has been idle for a week and the delay will translate as a delay to the final delivery.

What should happen if you want your process to go as fast as possible

You understand that the development process will go only as fast as the agency (your bottleneck).

You assign Person A to work with the agency and ensure that your team is available every day for 30min to answer Person A’s questions, ensuring the agency receives inputs immediately.

You accept that those daily 30min might not be needed and you accept that Person A might have spare time while waiting for the agency, knowing that Person A’s “empty time” is exactly what is needed to ensure that, as soon as the agency asks, he is able to answer.

The pushback

“Why don’t you simply cut the unoccupied employee?”

Spare capacity is justified by what happens when the bottleneck calls, not by how busy the calendar looks.

Otherwise, the bottleneck asks for help and none comes, slowing down the bottleneck and thus the whole process.

Or, even worse, the bottleneck now moves to the piece of the process with one fewer resource, dropping the performance of the whole process to a yet lower ceiling.

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A process can only go as fast as its bottleneck and idle time on the non-bottleneck parts is the prerequisite for it to happen.

Either use that capacity to better serve the bottleneck or leave it idle for when you need it.

If your team is a non-bottleneck and it is at 100%, you are, by definition, filling its time with crap.

Thanks for reading,

Luca