My leadership team members are exhausted and complaining of chronic burnout, but when I look at their daily work, they are spending half their time doing the jobs of their direct reports. How do we fix a leadership team that compensates for weak teams instead of leading them?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Leadership burnout is almost never caused by strategic thinking. It is caused by executives compensating for low performers and missing systems beneath them. When leaders spend their days putting out frontline fires, reviewing low-level tasks, and fixing operational errors, they become glorified managers and neglect their true executive accountabilities.

Run your leadership team through the Delegate and Elevate tool. Have each leader catalog every task they perform over a two-week period and place them into four quadrants: Love and Great at, Like and Good at, Don't Like but Good at, and Don't Like and Not Good at. To build an exit-ready company, your leaders must spend eighty percent of their working hours in the top two quadrants.

For everything falling in the bottom quadrants, force the issue. Are those tasks sitting on the leader's plate because their direct reports lack the capacity to do them, or because the leader refuses to let go of control?

If the direct reports lack capacity, evaluate them using the People Analyzer. If you have Wrong Person, Right Seat or Right Person, Wrong Seat issues below the leadership level, you must upgrade those roles immediately. Tolerating underperformers beneath your executives burns out your leadership team and costs you your best talent.

If the issue is micromanagement, train your leaders to manage via weekly Level 10 Meetings and clear Scorecards. Require them to lead, manage, and hold people accountable rather than stepping in to do the work themselves.