What to Do When There's Too Much Work

Gretchen Gavett · article · 2026-09-22 Reader 🖥️

Burnout & Recovery Cognitive Load Organizational Legibility Psychological Safety Role Stress Taxonomy (Overload / Ambiguity / Conflict)Team Autonomy

When a team is overloaded, the leader's instinct to personally absorb the excess work is the wrong fix because it merely burns the leader out without solving anything; the real levers are diagnostic (confirm the stressor is actually workload, not role ambiguity or role conflict) and structural (redistribute decision-making capacity itself — externalizing tacit judgment criteria and pushing real authority, not just tasks, downward) rather than adding capacity or subtracting volume.

practical · expository — This is Gavett's 'The Insider' newsletter roundup, not a single self-contained essay: it digests and juxtaposes two HBR pieces (Melody Wilding on leader-absorbed overload; Sawhney & McCord's meta-analytic research on workplace stressors), then adds shorter AI-related pointers and a separate item on dominating/micromanaging. The unity below is the thesis Gavett constructs by placing the two lead pieces back to back, even though she never states it as a single claim herself.

Structure

Part	Role
Opening framing: HBR subscribers consistently report work volume as a persistent pain point, with causes (AI, layoffs, budget crises) treated as interchangeable and largely given.	context
Wilding's five strategies for leaders whose teams are overloaded, with 'downloading your thinking' and 'pushing authority down, not just tasks' highlighted	evidence / main prescriptive argument
Sawhney & McCord's 60-years/515-study research distinguishing role overload, role ambiguity, and role conflict as separate stressors	evidence / diagnostic qualifier
Four brief AI-related pointers (capex/macroeconomy framing, process redesign over automation, AI and psychological safety, 'process collapse' in creative work)	tangential context, loosely thematically linked to organizational overload
Matviak & Gardiner's research on dominating conversations and micromanaging as collaboration-damaging behaviors senior leaders underestimate in themselves	parallel argument thread on leader behavior, not directly about workload
Closing must-reads list and a reminder to celebrate wins	flavor / newsletter convention

Key terms

Downloading your thinking
Wilding's term (via Gavett) for a leader explicitly articulating the criteria they weigh, the factors they prioritize, and what they let slide and why — converting tacit personal judgment into a shareable, applicable rule set so the team can act without routing decisions through the leader.
Pushing authority down, not just tasks
Distinguishes delegating mere task execution (which still requires the leader's judgment/approval, so the leader remains the bottleneck) from delegating actual decision rights — the authority to decide, not just the labor to execute.
Role overload / role ambiguity / role conflict
Three distinct categories of workplace stressor from Sawhney & McCord's research: role overload is too much work; role ambiguity is unclear expectations about the role itself; role conflict is incompatible demands within or across roles. The point of naming them separately is that 'stress' commonly gets collapsed into 'workload' when it may actually be one of the other two.
Process collapse
A year-long study's term (cited but not elaborated by Gavett) for generative AI degrading creative workflows — easier concept generation coexisting with unrealistic client expectations and (implied) a loss of process rigor.

Propositions

explicitLeaders whose teams are overloaded commonly respond by trying to personally absorb the extra work themselves, and this response leads to their own burnout rather than solving the team's problem.conf: high
explicitLeaders typically keep the criteria behind their own decisions and tradeoffs — what they'd weigh, what they'd prioritize, what they'd let slide and why — tacit and un-externalized, which forces routine decisions to route through the leader.conf: high
explicitMaking decision criteria explicit ("downloading your thinking") lets a team proactively tackle work without the leader as bottleneck.conf: high
explicitRelieving team overload requires pushing authority — not just tasks — down to people who themselves manage others or work cross-functionally, including teaching them to frame a hand-off strategically.conf: high
extendsHow Fast-Growing Companies Can Make Better Decisions · p4 — Applies the general structured-empowerment principle (curated decision authority plus outcome accountability resolves the centralize/decentralize tradeoff) to the specific case of an individual leader relieving team overload, a scale/context the original article doesn't cover.
supportsFrontline Workers Know How to Solve Your Organization's Biggest Problems · p12 — Both converge on the same mechanism from opposite directions: ceding real decision authority (not just soliciting input or handing off tasks) is what actually produces buy-in and relieves the bottleneck — frontline-listening context here, leader-delegation context there.
supports3 Questions to Pressure-Test Your Priorities · p4 — Complementary logic: the Replacement Test says a decision is worth a leader's time only if they're uniquely positioned to make it; 'push authority down' is the corollary — if they're not uniquely positioned, the decision right itself should move, not just the task.
implicitThe actual fix for team overload is redistributing decision-making capacity and authority, not reducing the total volume of work or expanding the leader's own capacity — rearranging load rather than removing it.conf: high
supportsThe Invisible Work Draining Your Best Employees · p11 — Both treat current staffing/task volume as roughly fixed and locate the real lever in how load and decision-making are organized and redistributed, not in reducing the underlying amount of work.
explicitWorkload is a major workplace stressor but not the only, or necessarily the most damaging, one — role ambiguity and role conflict are separate, empirically established stressor categories.conf: high
explicitA stress problem must first be correctly diagnosed as role overload, role ambiguity, or role conflict, because intervening on the wrong stressor fails to fix the actual problem.conf: high
explicitThere is a counterintuitive relationship between employee engagement and high workloads, per the underlying research — the newsletter references this finding without stating it.conf: high
explicitSenior leaders systematically underestimate how often they dominate conversations and micromanage, and these two behaviors reinforce each other to damage collaboration, open dialogue, and trust.conf: high
explicitCollecting honest, structured feedback (a 360 instrument or anonymous survey) on one's own collaboration behaviors is a necessary precondition for correcting them, since self-perception underestimates the problem.conf: high
explicitRedesigning a workflow around AI should identify what should change, where humans should retain authority, and how the process should respond when the model is uncertain or wrong — rather than merely automating the old process as-is.conf: high
explicitUnderstanding how AI is affecting psychological safety may be the single most important thing a leader can do to understand their organization's culture in the AI era.conf: high
supportsManagers Are Not Overhead: They Are Infrastructure · p4 — Both identify psychological safety around AI experimentation/adoption as a high-leverage lever for organizational AI outcomes — this document as an assertion, the other with measured lift figures.
implicitThe article assumes the reader holds formal managerial authority over people whose tasks and decision rights can be redistributed — it leaves unaddressed how someone who leads through expertise and influence without headcount authority would apply 'push authority down.'conf: medium

Arguments

Leaders should stop personally absorbing team overflow work and instead redistribute decision-making capacity to the team.

Explicit premises:

Absorbing extra work personally leads to leader burnout, not resolution of the team's overload.
Leaders keep decision criteria tacit, which forces decisions to route through them.
Externalizing decision criteria and pushing authority (not just tasks) down lets the team act without the leader as bottleneck.

Implicit premises:

The team's inability to act autonomously — not the raw volume of tasks — is the actual constraint on throughput; this is a decision-rights bottleneck, not a hands bottleneck.
A leader's tacit judgment can be reliably decomposed into explicit, transferable criteria without losing the nuance that made it good judgment in the first place.
The team already has the skill and inclination to exercise more responsibility and merely lacks the explicit criteria and permission to do so — this excludes the case where the team also lacks the underlying expertise or capability, not just the authorization.

Inferences:

A leader's recurring 'I don't have time' complaint is frequently better diagnosed as 'I haven't delegated the judgment, only the task.'
Leaders should audit their own decision log for how often they are making calls a report could make if given the criteria and explicit license to do so.

Before intervening on a team's 'workload' problem, a leader should first determine whether the actual stressor is role overload, role ambiguity, or role conflict. strength: high