A leader I worked with had a reputation for exceptional accountability.
If something needed to get done, they stepped in.
New initiative? They’d take it.
Executive request? They’d take it.
Another team falling behind? They’d take it.
From the outside, it looked like commitment and drive.
But as their role and scope expanded, they hit a wall.
They couldn’t scale. But they kept trying to do it all.
More hours.
More projects.
More hands-on intervention.
Very soon, “always accountable” began looking like:
Always underwater.
Always a bottleneck.
Always exhausted.
All because they wanted to do right by their business and team.
But volume does not equal value.
In fact, taking on too much doesn’t just fail to add value, it actively erodes it.
The turning point came when this leader began asking one question before taking on something new:
“Is this the best use of my time?”
Sometimes the answer was yes. More often, it wasn’t.
As they drew new boundaries, their energy returned, and they finally started operating at the altitude their role demanded.
And their team got to step up, too.
There’s a lot we can’t control in the Age of Overload.
But this one question is yours to ask. Every single time.