Management teams around the world are becoming increasingly busy, but not necessarily more effective. When governance groups, operational decisions, and change initiatives take over the calendar, the strategic perspective risks disappearing. The result is an organization that is well-organized to handle today’s issues, but less prepared for tomorrow’s challenges.
Overloaded management, understaffed organization
The leadership’s capacity crisis in a time of group-management inflation
Many organizations today invest more time, resources, and expertise in governance than ever before. Despite this, management teams are witnessing a sense of diminished control, not only over the future but also over the present.
The paradox is striking. The number of change initiatives is increasing. The number of projects is growing. The reports are becoming more numerous. The governance structures are becoming more comprehensive. At the same time, many management teams are experiencing that they are getting less and less time to focus on the issues that determine the long-term success of the organization. The strategic perspective is being pushed aside by operational decisions. Instead of shaping the future, management is stuck in managing the present.
When everything becomes important, nothing becomes important.
In many larger organizations, a culture has emerged in which everything is perceived as strategically important and therefore needs the attention of management. The CEO must approve minor purchases, consulting assignments, travel expenses, personnel matters, and budget deviations. Each individual decision may seem insignificant, but the cumulative effect is that the management gradually becomes the organization’s most burdened processing function. At the same time, another development is underway.
Almost every change initiative establishes a steering group. Each project is considered so important that someone from management is expected to participate. Let’s calculate the consequences. If a member of the management group participates in thirty steering groups and each steering group requires one hour of meeting time per week, that means thirty hours of steering group work each week. In a forty-hour workweek, that corresponds to 75 percent of available working time. What remains is ten hours for:
- management meetings,
- business management,
- personal responsibility,
- development and salary talks,
- customer and stakeholder relations,
- budget work,
- risk management,
- competence development,
- and strategic planning.
Above all, there is almost no time left for what is actually the core task of management: to think.
The strategic blindness
The biggest problem is not that management works too much. The problem is that they work on the wrong things. When the calendar is filled with steering group meetings, reconciliations, and operational decisions, the space for analysis, monitoring, and strategic reflection disappears. The future competes for attention with today’s every little detail and almost always loses out. For large organizations, this is especially problematic. Their decisions have consequences far beyond the next quarter. They need to understand how technological developments, artificial intelligence, geopolitics, demographic changes, skills supply, and regulatory requirements will affect the business over the next five to ten years. Such questions require something that has become a scarce commodity in many management teams: time to think, time to analyze, and time to prioritize.
A system failure, not a leadership failure
Many try to solve the problem through more efficient meetings, more reports, or new digital tools. But these measures primarily attack the symptoms. The real question is structural: What issues really need to be addressed by management?
In organizations where mandates are unclear and decision-making has been gradually moved up the hierarchy, management quickly becomes a bottleneck. Decisions that should be made close to the operations are escalated upward. Projects that should be coordinated across the portfolio require direct management presence. The organization then becomes dependent on the management’s available time rather than on its collective capabilities. When this happens, a systemic failure occurs. Management becomes preoccupied with keeping the operations running instead of ensuring that the operations develop.
The need for a strategic protective function
Here, the Chief of Staff function becomes increasingly relevant. A modern Chief of Staff does not serve as an additional layer of management, but as a capacity booster for the management. The role helps protect the management’s focus by:
- prioritize and coordinate initiatives,
- coordinate project and change portfolios,
- create clear decision-making materials,
- ensure that the right questions are escalated,
- reduce unnecessary management burden,
- free up time for strategic work.
The goal is not to reduce control. The goal is to restore control over what is actually important.
The crucial leadership question
All organizations should regularly ask themselves a simple but uncomfortable question:
What proportion of management time is currently spent on tasks that only management can do?
If the answer is vanishingly small, it is likely not a capacity problem. It is a management problem. The organization may then be very effective at handling yesterday, but poorly equipped to face tomorrow. And perhaps that is precisely where our time’s greatest management challenge lies.
