Are We Trying to Do Too Much?
Most leadership teams can name their top priority. Fewer can name their top three without hedging. Almost none can explain, with a straight face, how all twenty-something initiatives currently in flight rank against each other in importance. That's the actual, lived experience of trying to do too much, and it's far more common than most leaders are willing to admit out loud.
Harvard Business Review documented a case at a Fortune 500 retail company that captures this almost perfectly. Store managers already had more duties than they could complete in a standard workweek. Rather than reduce demands on them, leadership simply expected them to prioritize and juggle harder.
When business results started faltering and customer service scores slipped, a task force went looking for the cause and found that more than 90 separate initiatives had been deployed across the company in the previous six months alone. Ninety. Not over a year. In half of one. Nobody had decided to create that kind of overload on purpose. It accumulated, one reasonable-sounding initiative at a time, until the volume itself became the problem.
This is the part leaders consistently underestimate: doing too much doesn't just slow down any one initiative. It degrades all of them simultaneously, because attention and energy are finite resources being divided across an ever-growing list. McKinsey's research on this is blunt: companies that spread resources across too many initiatives struggle to make meaningful progress on any of them, and when teams are stretched this thin, effectiveness doesn't dip a little, it plummets.
The deeper issue is that "too much" rarely announces itself as a single bad decision. It arrives the way Ford once arrived at owning Volvo, Jaguar, Land Rover, a stake in Mazda, and Mercury, alongside Ford itself: a new acquisition here, a new initiative there, each one feeling like ambition at the time. By the time resources got stretched and the market turned, the company couldn't properly invest in fixing or growing any of them. Nobody set out to build something unmanageable. It just felt like progress until it very suddenly didn't.
This is the heart of Simplify Aggressively, the second principle in the BrandTruth Alignment™ System: complexity almost never feels like a problem while it's accumulating. It feels like momentum, ambition, responsiveness to opportunity. The reckoning only arrives later, when the organization tries to actually execute on everything it said yes to and discovers it can't.
So the question worth asking your team this week isn't "what should we add." It's the much harder one: if you had to cut 30% of what this team is currently doing, what would survive, and what would you secretly be relieved to let go of? If that question makes the room uncomfortable, that discomfort is information. It's telling you the real list, the one everyone already knows in private, just hasn't been said out loud yet.
Getting honest about how much is actually on your plate, and having the discipline to cut it down, is some of the hardest work a leadership team can do, and some of the most valuable. At Leadership In Focus, this is exactly where we help teams start. Reach out to us at contact@leadershipinfocus.ca to talk through what that could look like for your organization.
