Everything Feels Harder Because It Is — And What the Best Leaders Are Doing About It

I had a conversation last month with a hospital administrator — someone who has led through budget crises, staffing shortages, and a global pandemic. She said something that stayed with me:

“I’ve been doing this for twenty years. I’m better at it than I’ve ever been. And it has never been this hard.”

She’s not alone. In our work with organizations across sectors, we hear some version of this in nearly every engagement. Leaders who are experienced, capable, and committed — feeling overwhelmed in ways they can’t quite articulate.

The data confirms what they’re feeling.

The role has expanded. Nothing got removed.

Gartner reports that the average manager’s span of control has ballooned 2.8-fold since 2017. Managers now oversee nearly three times the number of employees they did less than a decade ago. And according to DDI’s 2026 leadership research, 51% of managers carry more responsibilities than they can reasonably handle. (See also: The Three Rs of Leadership.)

That’s not a motivation problem. That’s a math problem.

Meanwhile, 74% of managers report lacking the influence or resources to support their teams effectively. Only 19% say they have sufficient time to fulfill their responsibilities with the depth and diligence required. And Gallup found that manager engagement itself — the engagement of the people responsible for everyone else’s engagement — fell from 30% to 27% in a single year.

So what changed?

It’s tempting to point at one thing — the pandemic, remote work, AI, generational shifts. But the reality is that all of these are happening simultaneously. Not sequentially. That’s the difference.

Leaders are managing more people, across more locations and modalities, using more technology platforms, navigating faster cycles of change, and carrying expanded expectations around coaching, wellness, and culture — all at once. And in most organizations, nothing was subtracted to make room. (See also: Burnout Is Not a Character Flaw — It’s a System Output.)

We keep adding to the leadership role without removing anything. Then we wonder why leaders are drowning.

The distinction that matters: complicated vs. complex

One of the most useful distinctions I introduce in leadership development work is the difference between complicated and complex problems.

Complicated problems have solutions. They require expertise, analysis, and execution. A complicated problem is like building a bridge — difficult, but knowable.

Complex problems don’t have solutions in the traditional sense. They have emergent responses that require experimentation, adaptation, and tolerance for ambiguity. A complex problem is like raising a child — every input interacts with every other input, and the “answer” keeps changing.

The trap most leaders fall into is applying complicated-problem thinking to complex challenges. They try to analyze, plan, and execute their way through situations that actually require sensing, testing, and adapting.

When everything feels harder, part of the issue is that we’re using the wrong tools for the type of challenges we face.

What the best leaders are doing differently: the complexity triage

The diagnosis is clear. But diagnosis without treatment is just a more informed version of suffering. So what are the organizations that are actually navigating this doing differently?

In our consulting practice, we see a pattern. The leaders who are managing complexity effectively are not working harder. They are triaging smarter. And the triage follows a consistent three-step process.

Step one: Audit the role

Last fall, I facilitated a working session with the COO of a mid-sized healthcare system and her direct reports. We ran an exercise I’ve started using in almost every engagement: map everything that has been added to your role in the past three years on the left side of a whiteboard. Map everything that has been removed on the right.

The “added” side filled up fast. Twenty-three items. New compliance reporting. An AI governance committee. Two additional direct reports absorbed from a restructured division. Wellness check-ins. DEI program oversight. A new EHR platform rollout. Hybrid scheduling coordination. Crisis communications protocols that never existed before 2020.

The “removed” side had zero items.

The COO stared at the board for a long time. Then she said: “We’ve been asking why people are struggling. I think we just answered it.”

Most organizations have a detailed process for adding responsibilities to a role. A business need arises, someone has to own it, and it gets assigned. But there is no corresponding process for removing responsibilities. Nothing triggers a subtraction. The system only adds.

The role audit makes the accumulation visible. When a leadership team sees twenty-three additions and zero subtractions on a whiteboard, the conversation shifts. It stops being about individual capacity and starts being about system design.

The practical discipline is straightforward: before adding a new responsibility, require a corresponding subtraction or redistribution. Not as a principle. As a policy. If the answer is “we can’t remove anything,” then the honest answer is “we can’t add this either” — or we need to add headcount, budget, or structural support to absorb it.

Gartner’s own recommendation aligns with this. They found that the organizations successfully navigating complexity are the ones that explicitly redesign manager roles rather than continuously expanding them. The redesign starts with the audit.

Step two: Distinguish complicated from complex

This distinction has become one of the most useful frameworks I share with leadership teams.

Complicated problems — building a bridge, implementing a new software system — are knowable. Difficult, but knowable. You can plan your way through them.

Complex problems — leading culture change, navigating a market disruption while simultaneously restructuring your workforce — involve multiple interdependent variables where cause and effect are only visible in retrospect. These problems require experimentation, rapid feedback loops, and tolerance for ambiguity.

The trap is applying complicated-problem tools to complex challenges. Leaders try to analyze, plan, and execute their way through situations that actually require sensing, testing, and adapting. They build elaborate project plans for problems that will change shape before the plan is finished.

The practical shift: when your team encounters a new challenge, start by asking which type of problem it is. If it is complicated, assemble expertise and build a plan. If it is complex, design a small experiment, test it quickly, learn from the results, and iterate. Different problems need different tools. Using the wrong tool does not make you a bad leader — it makes you an exhausted one.

Step three: Clarify decision rights

Of the three steps, this one produces the fastest relief.

In most organizations, leaders are bottlenecked on far more decisions than they need to be. Decisions that could be made two or three levels down float upward because no one has explicitly clarified who has the authority to make them. The result is artificial overload — leaders spending time on decisions that don’t require their judgment while the decisions that do require their judgment get delayed.

Decision-rights clarity means answering a simple question for every recurring decision type: Who decides? At what level? With what information? And who needs to be informed afterward?

When we run this exercise with leadership teams, they typically identify 30-40% of the decisions currently landing on their desks that could be pushed to a lower level with clear guardrails. That is not delegation in the vague sense of “empower your people.” It is architectural redesign of how decisions flow through the organization.

The effect is immediate. Leaders regain bandwidth. Teams gain autonomy. And the decisions that genuinely need senior leadership attention actually get it — rather than competing with routine approvals for calendar space.

The pattern underneath

These three steps — audit, distinguish, clarify — share a common logic. They are all acts of subtraction. You subtract accumulated responsibilities. You subtract the wrong problem-solving approach. You subtract unnecessary decision bottlenecks.

The instinct in most organizations is to add. Add a program. Add a tool. Add a training module. Add a meeting. But when the fundamental problem is overload, addition is not the answer.

The best leaders I’ve worked with have learned to ask a different question. Not “What should we add?” but “What should we stop doing?”

That question — asked honestly and acted on consistently — is the beginning of a fundamentally different relationship with complexity.

What would show up on your whiteboard? If you mapped what’s been added to your role versus what’s been removed, what would the ratio look like — and what’s one thing you’d subtract if you could?

Sources

• Gartner — Manager Span of Control Research (2024)
• DDI — Global Leadership Forecast 2026
• Gallup — State of the Global Workplace (2025)

Gordon Klein is the founder of Reflect Excellence, a leadership and organizational performance consulting firm. He serves on the Sterling Council board and contributes to the design of Sterling’s Leadership Development curriculum. He works with organizations across sectors — healthcare, government, education, and business — on the systemic challenges that make leadership harder than it needs to be. Connect with him to continue the conversation. (See also: What If the System Is the Problem?.)