HBR describes a situation in which an excess of priorities becomes normal for senior executives. The solution involves hard trade-offs, redistributing authority and protecting executive time for genuinely strategic work, rather than relying on heroics.
Key takeaways
- A CEO who tries to do everything quickly becomes a bottleneck rather than a strategic architect.
- Putting more pressure on an already overloaded team undermines trust and can accelerate the loss of strong people.
- To create additional capacity, leaders must both remove unnecessary work and rethink who holds decision-making authority.
What this means for CEOs
The ability to decline secondary tasks and delegate authority is part of a leader’s operating model. Without it, strategy loses out to daily firefighting.