After Working With Hundreds of Leaders, Here’s What’s Actually Burning Out Your Best People

There’s a question I ask in every diagnostic conversation I have with leaders.

“Do you feel like your people are working on the right things, at the right time, with the right amount on their plate?”

If the answer were a resounding yes, we probably wouldn’t be having the conversation.

Today, let’s talk about the third pressure point: Utilization.

At its core, Utilization is about two things:

1. how much is given to and expected from people within their available time
2. what people are being asked to do within the time they have available

Unsurprisingly, it turns out that “active,” “busy,” and “effective” are not synonyms.

The Hands of the Operation

In the Pressure Points framework, Utilization maps to the hands, because it’s through our labor that we make our contribution to the team.

Our capacity to contribute can be supercharged or decimated based on factors that are often out of our control. Someone who is given the chance to spend their time doing work aligned with their natural strengths, will likely outperform the person toiling away on a task outside their skillset. And even the most talented member of our team can fail to meet expectations when their plate is so full that nothing gets their full attention.

Poor utilization of people is rarely a deliberate choice. Instead, it’s a natural consequence of too many meetings, a lack of visibility for what work has been assigned to each person, or an underinvestment in team member strengths assessments over rigid job descriptions.

But all of this is fixable, with the right pressure.

The Two Factors

Both Utilization factors tend to travel together. But, it’s easier to understand how these factors lead to problems when first we separate them.

Time

Is there enough of it? Is it being protected? Are too many meetings eating into the hours when the work actually gets done? Are people spread across so many projects that none of them ever gets their full attention?

This requires that we are able to see the amount of time available, how much is assigned within that time, and whether the math of that equation adds up. If we can’t see capacity and how much we’re using it, or the numbers show an overallocation, we can’t be surprised when problems arise.

We’re simply not utilizing time effectively.

Fit

Are people working on things that match what they’re actually good at? Are their strengths being deployed where they’ll have the most impact, or are they being assigned based on whoever happens to be available or least expensive?

This requires that we know the people on our team, and understand what work they are best suited for. If we don’t know what people are good at or struggle with, or we do and give them tasks they will struggle with anyway without adjusting our expectations, we shouldn’t be surprised when problems arise.

We’re simply not utilizing people effectively.

We need both

Utilization is about workload. But a person’s workload is more than just work assigned and time available. It’s about how the work makes them feel, it’s about the energy it requires from them, and it’s those same factors compounded with each member of the team. One person out of position on any team is costly. You can’t just swap someone from accounting with someone from marketing. Rarely are members of a team directly interchangeable.

A person buried in work they’re not suited for isn’t just less productive, they’re also less engaged, more likely to make mistakes, and more likely to burn out. Meanwhile, someone whose strengths are being underused is a problem you may never even see until they leave for a position that lets them spread their wings.

But there is another element of time and talents we need to talk about. It’s the invisible one.

Capacity Isn’t the Same for Everyone

The most effective form of Utilization means understanding what your people are best suited for, how much time they need for it, AND understanding when they work best. If our goal is about achieving the best outcomes, then we need to resist the urge to try and dictate how they allocate their time.

• People have different energy patterns throughout the day. Some are sharpest in the morning, while others build momentum and hit their stride by midday, and some burn the midnight oil. Telling a night owl to “eat the frog” is rarely productivity advice — it’s often counterproductivity advice.
• Interruptions affect people in different ways. Some can bounce back from it, for others, it can sink the rest of the day. Scheduling an open block on someone’s calendar might not be as harmless as some people think it is.
• Some people have a consistent rhythm of output, where others have extreme peaks and valleys. But what’s more productive: 8 hours of consistent work, or 4 hours that produce the same output?

Teams that truly understand utilization will take the time to deeply understand what is the right work for each person on their team. They will be able to see how much is on each person’s plate relative to their personal capacity. They will be able to trust people to manage their own time to deliver work on time.

What Utilization Is Actually Solving

When we map Utilization to the six organizational pains, once again, the patterns are clear.

Speed

• Key people are assigned too much, get spread too thin, all of which causes nothing gets their focused attention. Things slow down and start piling up.
• Meetings consume too much time and cause interruptions needed for momentum and execution. Timelines get extended.
• When the wrong person gets put on the wrong task, everything takes longer, there are more errors, and supervisors spend more time checking in.

Consistency

• Overloaded people cut corners to survive.
• Work gets delegated to whoever is available rather than whoever is qualified. The results are unsurprisingly worse than from those who find the work easy.
• With and overbooked schedule, there is less time for quality review or iteration.

Output

• Without visibility some people may have excess capacity while others are drowning. Neither state produces what the organization actually needs.
• With too much on their plate, people can neither focus on high volume or high quality output.

Innovation

• Calendars packed with execution and status meetings leave no time for creative thinking. No space for experimentation means no experimentation.
• The brains most suited for creative thinking may find themselves bogged down in meetings or operational work, letting innovation slip away while they check email.

Prioritization:

• When people are assigned too many things at once, everything becomes equally urgent. Those most important work may get passed over.
• Without a way to see what’s on everyone’s plate, nothing is ever held off until the most important work gets done. Everything enters the pipeline at the same urgency level.
• People can be genuinely busy on genuinely low-priority work — and no one notices until it’s too late.

Burnout

• When people are forced to work on the wrong things, they get frustrated, their managers get frustrated, and eventually they just stop trying.
• The most reliable team members pick up all the slack and keep going until they’ve had enough and leave.

Utilization Is a Leadership Responsibility

Getting Utilization right means being willing to look honestly at how your people are actually spending their time. This requires tools to visualize, but viewing conversations as an opportunity learn and understand.

Leaders must protect the conditions that produce the best output, even when the calendar is full and the pressure is on. That means rethinking performance standards. Holding everyone to the same standard, regardless of their strengths, their wiring, or what they’re carrying, is not “fair” — it’s poor utilization.

Our goal should never be maximum effort or hours worked, but maximum contribution. We want everyone doing great work, finishing the day satisfied, and still having some gas left in their tank for the next day.

What Comes Next

The final post in this series covers Systems — the tools, processes, and structures that either support everything above or quietly undermine it.

If your team has reasonable Clarity, strong Collaboration, and thoughtfully deployed people, but the systems don’t support them, you’ll still feel every one of the six pains. Systems is where all of that either holds together or falls apart.

For a structured way to start mapping your organization’s Utilization gaps to the root causes driving them, you can learn more and take the diagnostic at getsuperproductive.com/pressure-points.

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