You Can Handle The Pressure. But Should Your Best Thinking Be Wasted On Decisions You Already Know You Need To Make?
There is a particular kind of overload that rarely looks like overload.
You are still delivering. The client receives the strategy. The board gets the paper. The business keeps moving. Your reputation remains intact. Yet somewhere beneath all that competence sits the partnership you need to renegotiate, the opportunity requiring a definitive yes or no, the person you should have stopped compensating for months ago, or the boundary you know needs resetting.
My latest blog, Strategic Decision Debt, asks what happens when successful women become so accomplished at managing unresolved situations that they stop noticing what those situations are taking from us.
Behavioural scientist Sophie Leroy calls part of this phenomenon ‘attention residue’. Her research found that when we move from unfinished work to another demanding task, part of our attention can remain attached to what came before, with consequences for performance.
For an entrepreneur, founder, consultant or senior leader whose value increasingly lies in judgement, negotiation, creativity and strategic foresight, fragmented attention is not a minor productivity issue. It is expensive intellectual real estate.
There is also a cultural layer that generic leadership advice can miss. Research from Black academics Marlese Durr and Adia Harvey Wingfield has documented the additional impression management and emotional labour Black professional women can navigate alongside performance itself. Add intergenerational expectations around working twice as hard, remaining dependable, supporting others and never wasting an opportunity and “just say no” begins to sound remarkably inadequate.
Perhaps the real question at this stage of your career is no longer whether you ‘can’ carry everything because you have already proved that. The question is whether carrying it is still the best use of your strategic capacity.
If you are building something significant, advising at a high level or preparing for your next chapter of leadership, this is worth reading.
Give Yourself Time For Reflection
What decision have you become exceptionally good at managing around rather than making? Join the CareerTalk conversation and like, comment and share this with another over achiever whose next breakthrough may begin with deciding what no longer deserves her attention.
