Is your team underperforming? Or is it underwater?
Overcommitment isn’t a performance problem.
It’s a leadership one.
Execution problems are almost always misread.
You see slippage and then reach for familiar responses: tighten accountability, have more frequent check-ins, set seemingly clearer deadlines.
Those aren’t wrong, exactly. But they’re treating the symptom. What I see happening most frequently right now isn’t a discipline issue. It’s that your team is drowning.
Teams aren’t failing to execute because they don’t care or don’t know how. They’re failing because the volume of what’s been declared important has exceeded the organization’s actual capacity to pursue any of it well.
Progress gets spread too thinly.
New priorities layer on top of old ones. Legacy work never fully comes off the table. The result isn’t dramatic — no single project collapses — but progress gets spread so thinly across so many efforts that none of them build real momentum. I’ve talked about this with mid-level leaders in development programs and workshops. I’ve heard about it in coaching sessions with leaders. Dilution of effort is a harder problem to see than failure, which is exactly why it persists.
The instinct to add more oversight misses this entirely.
You can’t concentrate effort by increasing pressure on a system that’s already overextended. The only move that actually works is reducing the load — deliberately, visibly, with the willingness to say out loud that something that once mattered now matters less.
Here are two steps you can take immediately
- Cut one active initiative, not because it’s unimportant but because capacity is finite and concentration is a choice.
- Then define what success looks like for your top priority over the next 60 days — one owner, one visible measure, nothing ambiguous.
Execution isn’t always a discipline problem. It’s often a design problem. How can you fix the design?
