Your boss hands you the priority on Monday and a different one on Wednesday, and nobody tells you what to drop, so it all just stacks. You pass it to your team, they nod, and then they go and do the thing they already had in their heads. You sit in a meeting where everyone agrees, and two weeks later two teams ship work that cancels each other out, and you were the one who could see it coming.

You own the outcome. You do not own the decisions that get you there. So you chase people who do not report to you, you move things on relationships and goodwill because you have no real authority, and the day fills with other people’s gaps. And somewhere around ten at night the laptop opens, because now I can finally do my actual work.

Then something breaks. And the question (why did this happen?) lands on you, because you were the most visible name attached to it.

You are not the problem here. What you are carrying is. Six structural gaps form in the middle of every growing company, and you are standing in the middle of all six (most weeks it is more than one at a time). They are the reason a capable, committed person ends up running on empty at ten at night and wondering if it is just them.

It is not just you. And once you can see which gap is doing the most damage, there is almost always one thing you can do about it from exactly where you sit.