If you’ve ever arrived on vacation without your luggage, you know the frustration of bottlenecks. In air travel, they can happen when too many bags hit the sorting system or when tight transfers leave airline staff too little time to reload. However they occur, the result can be both aggravating and costly.

For business owners, bottlenecks can disrupt everyday workflows and ultimately strain an organization. Sometimes, they start at the top. As CEO of my company, Jotform, I often think about how closely leaders should manage their teams. I agree to an extent with founder mode , a leadership concept popularized by Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky, who said founders should remain highly involved in running their companies, challenging the idea that leaders should simply hire great people and step aside. But too much involvement can create bottlenecks of its own, especially as a company scales.

Striking the right balance can be tricky. ChatGPT can help. Here are a few prompts to get started.

I often write about workflows. They’re series of steps required to complete a task or project. Too often, we view workdays as discrete missions to accomplish, like separate boxes to tick on our daily to-do lists. But more often than not, your workload consists of interconnected tasks containing various dependencies. For example, if your colleague doesn’t finalize the email list, you can’t send that polished newsletter.

Bottlenecks are best avoided when you view a system holistically, rather than addressing issues piecemeal, according to recent research . That means breaking down all of your team’s tasks into workflows and identifying where bottlenecks tend to occur. ChatGPT can be a great partner for walking you through the process. Here’s a prompt to try:

“I’d like you to help me map my team’s workflow for [project/task] from start to finish. Please break it into clear stages, list the tasks within each stage, and identify dependencies between them (what must happen before the next step can begin). Then, ask me targeted questions so we can analyze the workflow for common bottlenecks, delays, redundant steps, approval slowdowns, communication gaps, or resource constraints.”

Clarify Owners And Objectives

Once you’ve identified the pain points, it’s time to address them.

According to experts, there are two types of bottlenecks: task and resource . The first type occurs when a task depends on another task to be completed—for example, the frontend developers are ready to build a new feature, but they’re stalled because the backend API hasn’t wrapped up yet. Communication tends to be the culprit in these kinds of logjams.

One way to address task bottlenecks is to ensure that it’s clear who’s responsible for what and what the objective is, on a micro and macro level. Each person needs to know what they’re setting out to accomplish, but also how that figures into the bigger picture. At Jotform, this helps our employees to set their priorities. If you know a colleague is waiting on your contribution, that task should often take priority over work that isn’t as time-sensitive.

Here’s a prompt to ensure that communication is clear within a specific workflow:

“Can you please review this workflow: [describe workflow]. I’d like you to help me ensure that owners are assigned to each step, the purpose of each task is crystal clear, and identify where unclear responsibilities or objectives could cause bottlenecks.”

Reduce Unnecessary Sign-Offs

When I took parental leave for my second and third kids, I knew that I didn’t want to merely work from home. I wanted to truly disconnect and check in once a day, tops. That meant having to automate, delegate, and train our employees to handle many of my tasks. The process made me realize just how many times I was signing off on tasks where I didn’t really need to be involved. Sometimes, it was something I had simply been doing since my company was a scrappy startup. Other times, it was a task that didn’t fit anyone else’s job description. In each case, I was able to find someone with the knowledge and experience to take the reins.

As leaders, it’s important to review the tasks you’re still signing off on and determine whether your involvement is truly necessary, or whether someone else could do the job just as well, if not better. Here’s a prompt to try:

“I’m going to share a list of the tasks and decisions I currently approve or sign off on as a leader. I’d like you to review them and help me identify which responsibilities require my involvement, and which could be delegated to someone else on the team. For each task, suggest the type of person best suited to take ownership based on skills, experience, and role. [Insert list.]”

Eliminate Redundant Decision-Making

Sometimes, the solution isn’t eliminating a decision or passing the baton—it’s killing two birds with one stone.

Imagine a factory where different teams build different products, and all of them require the same widget. Rather than having each team inspect the widget separately, it would make sense to streamline that step so that teams aren’t repeating the same work.

One of the key strategies for eliminating task bottlenecks is to centralize tasks , especially when they’re less complex (i.e., the relatively simple widget). At the same time, if you centralize too much, you might end up with delays as everyone waits for the output from the same source.

You can leverage ChatGPT to strike a balance.

“I’d like you to review this workflow: [describe process]. Please identify any tasks that are being duplicated across teams, and suggest which tasks should be centralized into a shared function or system to improve efficiency, and which should remain distributed to avoid creating a new bottleneck.”

Finally, sometimes bottlenecks happen when you simply don’t have enough resources to complete a task in a timely manner. The most important resource is your workforce. When teams are spread too thin, the obvious solution is to hire more people. But depending on the bottleneck, being too quick to hire can create excess capacity and eventually lead to staffing cuts.

For me, the strategy for growing sustainably to over 800 employees—avoiding bottlenecks while also avoiding rapid hiring and firing—is to first check whether an automated tool or platform can handle steps where processes tend to get stuck. For instance, when we realized that our customer service response times were slowing due to an influx of basic, repetitive questions, we began training AI agents to handle those standard inquiries and escalate more complex issues to human representatives.

Here’s a prompt to help you identify where AI-powered and automated tools can keep your workflows moving forward:

“Can you please review this workflow: [describe workflow]. I’d like you to identify steps that are repetitive or rules-based, and where automation or AI tools could be inserted. Please recommend specific tools or types of automation that could handle these tasks. [Optional: Also, please note any steps that should always be completed by employees, due to complexity, empathy, human judgment.]”

LLMs like ChatGPT are a great resource for making sure workflows run smoothly. That way, leaders and their teams can focus on work that moves the needle, rather than waiting for signoffs, repeating tasks unnecessarily, or wasting time and energy on rote, manual tasks. They help reduce friction and remove the turbulence of the average workday.