Dealing With Depletion
Fourth, if we seek to sustain the organization through challenging times, we need to understand that doing things that deplete us is very different than doing things when we are depleted. One of the most common problem for people in leadership positions during challenging times is decision fatigue. Endless numbers of people are coming to them at all hours of the day and night with small and large problems hoping that they, as the positional leader, will make a decision. And for every decision that is made, there is impact, and the potential for setting precedent. Therefore, leaders think about all of these decisions quite carefully.
However, the volume and magnitude of the decisions to be made is not matched with enough hours in the day to make the decisions. As a result, notes Marshall Goldsmith in his book, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts - Becoming the Person You Want to Be, (Crown Business, 2015), “we make careless choices or we surrender to the status quo and do nothing.” Either way, we end up drained. As Goldsmith continues, “It’s one thing to engage in depleting activities, but there’s another dimension: how we behave under the influence of depletion. Doing things that deplete us is not the same as doing things when we’re depleted. The former is cause, the latter effect.” And it is vital to our capacity to sustain an organization during challenging times to discern the difference.
“Good decisions are not made by those who are running on empty,” writes Ryan Holiday in his book, Stillness Is The Key (Portfolio/Penguin, 2019). “What kind of interior life can you have, what kind of thinking can you do, when you’re utterly and completely overworked? It’s a vicious cycle: We end up having to work more to fix the errors we made when we would have been better off resting, having consciously said no instead of reflexively saying yes. We end up pushing good people away (and losing relationships) because we’re wound so tight and have so little patience.”
One way to break this destructive cycle, and to recharge and gain perspective, is to create uninterrupted time and space for reflection. “If I was to sum up the single biggest problem of senior leadership in the Information Age,” four-star Marine Corps general and former secretary of defense James Mattis has said, “it’s lack of reflection. We need solitude to refocus on prospective decision-making, rather than reacting to problems as they arise.” Ryan Holiday builds on this perspective when he wrote, “If solitude is the school of genius, as historian Edward Gibbon put it, then the crowded, busy world is the purgatory of the idiot.” Thus, we need to give ourselves permission for reflection and solitude.
But I think a key to this choice was best defined by author and executive coach Lindsay Leahy when she wrote, “As with everything, I always encourage my clients to keep change simple and choose consistency over intensity.” As leaders, we need to recognize that consistent and routine, in-depth time to step back and engage in System 2 thinking rather than unproductive, reactionary action is the key that unlocks the destructive pattern of continually being depleted.
Working Coterminously
The aforementioned, four core concepts are not linear in nature. Instead, they are coterminous, namely they need to happen in a concurrent or as a synchronous pattern of choices. One of the choices is not more important than another. Instead, in a functional sense, they all need to happen at the same time.
Furthermore, with these four choices, the goal is not to get them “done,” as in the sense of getting past them. Instead the goal is to engage these concepts routinely over time. The goal is progress, and to articulate the underlying common purpose which unites these four choices, namely to sustain the organization as it moves through challenging times.
The result of these four choices being continually utilized over time is two fold. One, a leader gains experience which is a valuable source of knowledge for making better choices and better decisions. Two, the organization gains confidence, trust, and clarity which will help people, individually and collectively, move forward together.
As we all know, challenging times come and go. Uncertainty is uncomfortable and common for people in leadership positions. However, when we consciously make the right choices and are disciplined in our thoughts and actions, we can sustain ourselves and others to make it through our individual and collectively difficulties. The key is to choose wisely and to be proactive. This is something as leaders that we can and must do each and every day.
For Further Study:
- Charan, Ram. Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty: The New Rules for Getting the Right Things Done in Difficult Times, McGraw Hill, 2009.
- Heifetz, Ronald, Alexander Glasgow, and Marty Linsky. “Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis”, Harvard Business Review, July-August 2009.
- Pascale, Richard T., Mark Millemann and Linda Gioja. Surfing The Edge of Chaos: The Laws of Nature and the New Laws of Business, Three Rivers Press, 2000.
© Geery Howe 2025
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