A superintendent starts the day with a plan. By 10:00 am, it’s gone. A last-minute redesign derails production. He defaults to action. He steps in to do the work.
As Leigh Thompson, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management, argues, stepping in to handle others’ responsibilities “solves today’s problem—and creates tomorrow’s.”
Spending Time and Energy
When leaders—CEOs, project managers and forepersons—take on tasks that belong to their teams, they can become consumed by the details. That shift pulls them away from higher-level responsibilities and limits their ability to lead effectively.
It also reshapes team behavior. When leaders consistently intervene, team members can become less likely to take initiative or solve problems independently. Over time, that dynamic reduces both accountability and growth.
In her book Stop Spending, Start Managing, co-authored with Tanya Menon, Thompson argues that leaders spend time solving problems their teams should own. It feels productive. It is not.
Instead, leaders should create structures that allow teams to identify and address issues on their own. One practical tool is a team charter—a shared framework that defines roles, responsibilities, processes and communication expectations. Thompson says leaders and their teams should “co-create the rules of engagement.”
Too Many Nodes
The tendency to take on too much work is often the result of structural pressure. Organizations grow more complex than leaders realize. A leadership team wants to foster collaboration, and they give employees collaboration tools. Managers become overloaded by it. Their days are filled with emails, meetings and phone calls, leaving little time for planning or strategic thinking.
“In short order, the number of nodes involved in decision-making and execution explodes,” says Bain & Company’s Michael Mankins in “Collaboration Overload Is a Symptom of a Deeper Organizational Problem.”
Consider the superintendent bombarded with requests for information (RFIs), worker no-shows, site inspections and more. Each task demands attention. Each interruption feels justified. Delegation seems inefficient.
“Delegate? You mean explain my expectations, confirm everyone’s on the same page and follow up? It’s faster to do it myself.”
The problem is structural. The organization makes it easy to put more on the leader’s plate. The result is a reinforcing cycle of leaders taking on more work, while their teams become more dependent.
Unclear Decision Rights
Another way leaders get overloaded: unclear decision rights. When organizations fail to define who is responsible for which decisions, the decision-making just moves upward. A framing mechanic asks a question. The foreperson pushes it up. The project manager, unsure of authority, sends it higher.
Eventually, the decision lands in the inbox of the most experienced or most trusted person in the chain. They become the default decision-maker, regardless of whether the decision belongs with them. That person must drop what they are doing. They are responding to a system that routes decisions upward when authority is unclear. Each step adds delay. Each escalation increases the workload at the top, and it’s all due to structural ambiguity.
Gather your team and define decision rights. That includes clarifying who has authority, the criteria guiding decisions and when escalation is appropriate. This distributes decision-making closer to where the work occurs.
System Overload
Leaders do not fail to delegate out of preference. They are often working within systems that reward urgency, obscure responsibility and channel decisions upward.
If everything is urgent, nothing gets delegated. And if no one owns the decision, it ends up at the top. That’s not leadership. That’s overload.
Mark L. Johnson writes for the walls and ceilings industry. He is also the editor of BuildSteel.org. He can be reached via LinkedIn.com/in/markjohnsoncommunications.
