Idea in Brief

If “the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do,” as Michael Porter famously said in a seminal HBR article, then the essence of execution is truly not doing it. That sounds simple, but it’s surprisingly hard for organizations to kill existing initiatives, even when they don’t align with new strategies. Instead, leaders keep layering on initiatives, which can lead to severe overload at levels below the executive team.

Sometimes leaders are unaware of all the initiatives under way and their impact on the organization. In other cases organizational politics conspires to let initiatives continue long after they should have run their course. Either way, overload can result in costly productivity and quality problems and employee burnout. With record low unemployment, companies that do not adjust the workload are also at risk of losing valuable talent. One leader who used to head up talent consulting at a human capital firm told us in an interview, “While I enjoyed and respected my team and found the work motivating, the pace was unsustainable. I chose to leave before I had a heart attack.”

In many organizations, the alarm bells for initiative overload ring when engagement survey results drop or turnover levels rise—or both. At one Fortune 500 retail company, for example, internal studies showed that store managers had more duties than they could accomplish in a standard workweek. Instead of moderating the demands of the job, their bosses expected them to prioritize and juggle. Yet with business results faltering and customer service scores declining, the senior executive team realized that a new approach was needed and recommended that a task force of high-potential leaders assess the impact of initiatives on frontline store managers.

The task force found that many departments were simultaneously launching initiatives that required store managers’ attention, in areas such as product launches, training, customer service, and IT. A comprehensive review revealed that more than 90 distinct initiatives had gotten under way in the previous six months. Store managers were expected to absorb and act on them while dealing with high customer volume and managing the staff. All these demands took their toll. Some outlets failed to meet company expectations and forecasts, and adoption rates for new initiatives dropped, because the organization just couldn’t process them all.

When company leaders received the report, they realized that they had to be more disciplined about setting limits and priorities, rather than expect store managers to keep shouldering everything. The country president assigned a senior leader to act as the gatekeeper between functional departments and store managers. Departments could no longer reach out directly to managers with new work expectations—those were funneled through the leader, who assessed priorities and protected the managers from impossible work demands. This change allowed store managers to focus; doing less yielded better results on the key initiatives and priorities.

In our consulting work with dozens of businesses, we’ve seen the consequences of overload play out again and again across a range of industries. In conversations and interviews in a wide variety of organizations, capacity is a frequent topic: Leaders feel pressured to do more with fewer resources. We’ve identified several root causes, which we’ll discuss here so that you can spot the risks in your company. Organizations tend to rely on flawed fixes, so we’ll also explain why those typically fail and what works better.

The Roots of the Problem

Why does initiative overload happen? We have observed seven causes:

Impact blindness.

As the Fortune 500 retailer learned, executive teams can be oblivious to the number and cumulative impact of the initiatives they have in progress. Many organizations lack mechanisms to identify, measure, and manage the demands that initiatives place on the managers and employees who are expected to do the work. In practice, it can be challenging to measure the load across an organization, because of initiative volume, company complexity and size, and insufficient tracking tools. But as the example above shows, it can be done if the business dedicates resources to making it happen.

Multiplier effects.

Most senior leaders have a line of sight into their own groups’ initiatives and priorities but a limited view of other groups’ activities. Because functions and units often set their priorities and launch initiatives in isolation, they may not understand the impact on neighboring functions and units. Suppose, for example, that an organization consists of five units. If each one undertakes three initiatives, each of which requires some resources from two other units, then frontline managers in each unit are effectively juggling nine initiatives. And this assumes an even distribution of impact; if some units have particularly critical or scarce resources, their load could be far greater.

Political logrolling.

Executives tend to be strongly invested in some “signature” projects and may garner resources for them through implicit agreements with their peers: “I will support your initiatives if you support mine.” In the world of legislative politics, this is known as logrolling, a term reportedly coined in 1835 by U.S. Congressman Davy Crockett as a metaphor derived from the old custom of neighbors’ assisting one another with the moving of logs. In organizations it leads to a pileup of promises to fulfill—and projects that just won’t die. This can happen even after funding has been officially cut, because leaders may have their own deep pockets of funding and the decision-making power to keep their initiatives moving forward.

Unfunded mandates.

In the world of politics this term is used when legislatures pass laws that require certain things to happen but don’t provide funding for implementation. Similarly, in business, executive teams often task their organizations with meeting important goals without giving managers and their teams the necessary resources to accomplish them. In one major acquisition in which we were involved, the executive team spent tens of millions of dollars on consulting to design the new, combined organization’s strategy, structure, systems, and staffing but provided no funding to support the critical work of transition and integration. Largely as a result of conflicts between “us” and “them,” the acquiring company lost most of the acquired entity’s best talent—the retention of which had been a core goal. This is not an isolated example: Initiatives are often launched without having resources dedicated to them.

Band-Aid initiatives.

When projects are launched to provide limited fixes to significant problems, the result can be a proliferation of initiatives, none of which may adequately deal with root causes. We have seen companies make substantial investments in training programs in response to superficial assessments of the skills required, or provide limited support for integrating the new skills into day-to-day practice.

Cost myopia.

Another partial fix that can exacerbate overload is cutting people without cutting the related work. This happens when organizations fixate on lowering head count (an obvious way to rein in human capital costs) but overlook the price they might pay—in employee burnout, performance strain, and turnover—for expecting the remaining people to take on the tasks of those who have left. A leader at a consumer products firm described the problem in an interview: “We had planned to reengineer our processes, but it did not happen. The impact is that our people are working harder with fewer resources.”

Does Your Organization Have a Problem?

Initiative inertia.

Finally, companies often lack the means (and the will) to stop existing initiatives. Sometimes that’s because they have no “sunset” process for determining when to close things down. A project might have been vital for the business when it launched, but later the rationale no longer exists—and yet the funding and the work continue. For example, for decades many organizations used so-called mystery shoppers to gather customer feedback and evaluate customer service. With the internet, companies can now gather feedback and data directly from their customers. But many have been slow to make the shift, because parting with a well-oiled machine—even one that is clearly dated—means switching to less-tested systems that require all-new competencies. The habits and the infrastructure for mystery shoppers are already built. Capturing, understanding, and valuing customer data gathered online requires time and different skill sets. So, many traditional companies follow the lead of upstarts, which do not have to unlearn old, comfortable approaches: They hire new leaders with the right skills to help make the transition.

What Doesn’t Work

Recognizing initiative overload is an important first step—but leaders must then take meaningful action. Too often, though, they resort to strategies that either have no impact or make the problem worse. For instance:

Prioritizing by function or department.

Leaders are most comfortable setting priorities within their own area, because they know that territory best, but this does not allow them to recognize the cumulative impact of initiatives across groups. For example, a top goal for finance might be to adopt a new expense program across the enterprise. Even if it’s the right decision for the company, learning the new system by trial and error or through training places extra demands on leaders outside the finance function. Designated “superusers” put in even more time than most, coaching their colleagues on day-to-day use and fielding questions as they arise, and that eats into the time they can spend on their own teams’ projects. Of course, all those demands butt up against recurring processes that consume everyone’s time across the organization: Managers must create and manage budgets for finance, document individual and team performance for HR, undergo ethics or sexual harassment training for legal, and so on.

So priorities can’t be set in a vacuum. Senior leaders need to encourage transparent conversations across functions about work volume, initiative demands, and resources—this top-down message is critical. But they must also be receptive to constructive feedback from bottom-up conversations, and too often they just don’t want to hear about what people can’t do. In such an atmosphere, employees are afraid to voice concerns about workload or to admit having limits, because of the risk to their careers, so they keep mum. And without that input, leaders lack a full view of demands across the enterprise and can’t prioritize accordingly.

Establishing overall priorities without deciding what to cut.

Leadership teams often engage in prioritization exercises that define and communicate where people should focus their energy. However, they undermine those efforts if they don’t also do the hard work of explicitly deciding what trade-offs to make and what has to stop. At a real estate company we worked with, the leadership team decided to simultaneously launch more than a dozen initiatives. Project teams were formed and expected to produce results quickly. The desired outcomes were achieved, but at a steep cost: Key contributors decided to exit the organization rather than meet the escalated demands—exceedingly long hours and overwhelming new responsibilities.

Making across-the-board initiative cuts.

When leaders ask all departments or functions to cut their budgets or initiatives by a given amount—say, 10% to 20%—each group finds its own way to comply. However, this approach to reduction doesn’t take into consideration overall organizational priorities and interdependencies. As a result, cuts to projects in one function, such as IT or marketing, can undermine the ability of other functions to deliver critical projects. For example, as part of overall cost containment, the IT department at a hospitality company had to cut costs by 20%. So it moved to a model based on self-service and outsourcing and eliminated on-site, in-person computer support. Although IT achieved its cuts, all the other functions spent more time resolving their IT issues.

What Does Work

While challenging, it is possible to fight initiative overload and concentrate organizational resources on strategically essential projects. For example, CBIZ, a growing business-services company, has become much stricter about deciding which projects can move forward. Marina Davis, the company’s director of organization and talent development, told us in an interview, “We look at each initiative through two lenses: One, does it have a positive impact on the business? And two, does it have a positive impact on the culture? As we continue to gain speed, we are being very careful about choosing what we will and will not take on at this time.”

Similarly, senior leaders at the real estate firm mentioned earlier—the one that launched so many initiatives at once—began to see a need for change. Although they had pushed for business transformation that year, they didn’t want that pace to become the new normal. So they watched for signs of that in the next year and were surprised at the sheer volume of budget dollars being requested for even more initiatives, most of them internal—all-staff meetings, leadership development events, planning meetings, IT launches, and HR training. Although the company financials were strong enough to support the requests, the firm needed to focus more intently on hands-on sales, and the executive team worried that the other proposed initiatives could get in the way. To assess that concern, they asked functional leaders to break down travel budgets and time spent in and out of the office, along with development funding and facility and food costs, for each requested initiative. The human capital implications then became clear: Together, the internal meetings and events would demand more than 30% of managers’ time. After discussing the matter with the senior team and targeting a lower percentage of time away from customers, the CEO and the CFO decided which initiatives to keep and which to cut, favoring those that were important to generating business. The following year managers spent more time in the field and less in training and planning sessions, and the demands on their time became more manageable.

Of course, the best way to avoid initiative overload is to not allow it in the first place. That means building in rigorous reviews to impose discipline on when and how the organization launches initiatives—and keeping close tabs on whose time they consume, and how much. (See the sidebar “Questions to Ask Before You Launch an Initiative.”)

For companies already experiencing initiative overload, focusing on the benefits of cutting back can make the path forward somewhat easier. Organizations are at a great advantage when they learn how to say no, as Steve Jobs once put it, to the “hundred other good ideas that there are.” They can then use their creative and productive energy more wisely, foster greater employee commitment and loyalty, and accomplish more in the areas that really matter.