09 Jun Exceptional & Exhausted #7 Why the faster you run, the further behind you fall
Senior leaders lose strategic thinking time not because they are poor at managing their calendars, but because a deeper pattern keeps filling that space with urgency. PwC surveyed 4,454 CEOs across 95 countries at the start of this year and found that most leaders are spending the majority of their time on what is urgent — the fire, the request, the deliverable that cannot wait — and not nearly enough on what is important: the strategic thinking, the team development, the decisions that shape the next three years rather than the next three hours.
They did not need a survey to tell them that either. Most senior leaders I know feel this tension every Monday morning. They just cannot find a way out of it.
Gallup’s research tells us that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. The person in the room with the most impact on how the people around them perform is also, in most organisations, the most overwhelmed person in the room.
These two pieces of research describe the same trap from different angles. The pressure to deliver is accelerating. The person most responsible for the people around them is the one with the least capacity left to actually develop them. And so the team stays dependent, the leader stays essential, and the sprint continues because stopping feels more dangerous than exhaustion.
Nobody designed this. That is worth saying clearly before anything else.
The sprint is not irrational. In an environment where pressure compounds year on year, moving fast is the reasonable response. Absorbing what falls through the gaps is efficient. Answering the question rather than teaching someone to find the answer saves time today. Doing the work yourself rather than managing the handover feels responsible.
Every one of those choices makes sense in the moment. Repeated across months and years, they build something nobody chose to build: a team organised entirely around one person’s capacity, a leader who cannot step back because everything follows them, and an organisation that cannot promote the person it most depends on because replacing them seems impossible.
The sprint did not create this deliberately. It created it the way most important things get created: gradually, through accumulated reasonable decisions, until one day the shape of the whole becomes visible.
The connection between senior leader strategic thinking time and the overdelivering pattern runs deeper than most people initially recognise. It is not that there is no time for strategy. It is that the pattern actively consumes the space where strategy would live. Every absorbed task, every answered question that someone else could have answered, every decision that lands on one desk because that is where decisions have always landed — each one is a withdrawal from the strategic thinking account.
Here is what I observe in the leaders who navigate major pivots well. Restructurings, role changes, market shifts. It is not that they saw it coming. It is that they had already built something underneath the sprint. A team that could operate without them present for every decision. An inner steadiness that allowed them to respond from clarity rather than from the accumulated weight of everything they had been absorbing for years.
That inner foundation is not built during the crisis. It has to already be there.
The work that builds it is the identity work and the strategy work done simultaneously: understanding what is actually driving the overdelivering pattern, separating who you are from what you produce, and building a team capable of running without you at the centre of everything. This is also the work that prepares senior leaders for the identity questions AI disruption is now surfacing — because the pattern that limits strategic thinking time is the same one that makes career disruption feel most threatening. A leader with that foundation can sprint when the moment requires it. They can also stop, look at the whole picture, and choose the next direction rather than simply continuing in the one they are already moving in.
A sprinter runs fast but over time would collapse. A marathon runner paces, reads the terrain, and finishes.
The leaders who last are the ones who know the difference, and who have done the inner work that makes pacing possible rather than frightening.
One small experiment worth trying this week. At the end of a working day, ask honestly: what did I do today that genuinely required me? Not what was delivered well, not what went smoothly, but what actually needed me specifically and could not have been handled by someone else with the right development behind them.
Most people find the list shorter than expected. What fills the rest of the day is not unimportant. But knowing what is genuinely irreplaceable about your contribution and what has simply become habitual is where the space for senior leader strategic thinking time begins to open.
Do you think a leader should be a sprinter or a marathon runner?
Which pattern is holding your leadership back and shaping the system around you? A short quiz names it precisely. Five questions, two minutes: Take the quiz
Becoming the leader your next level is already waiting for.
Danguole Litvinskaite, The Leadership Coach Exceptional & Exhausted Senior Leaders Eventually Find
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do senior leaders struggle to find time for strategic thinking?
The PwC CEO survey findings reflect what most senior leaders already feel: the urgent consistently crowds out the important. This is not a time management failure. It is the structural consequence of an overdelivering pattern where absorbing, answering and doing feel more responsible than delegating, developing and stepping back. Until the pattern underneath is addressed, no calendar system will hold. The urgent will always find a way to fill the space the important was meant to occupy.
What does Gallup’s research on manager impact mean for overdelivering leaders?
Gallup’s finding that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement puts the overdelivering leader in a particular bind. They have the most influence on team performance and the least capacity to actually use it. The time spent absorbing, firefighting and doing what the team should be doing is time not spent developing the people who could transform engagement and reduce the dependency. The trap is self-reinforcing: the more essential the leader becomes, the less room there is to build the team that would make them less essential.
How do senior leaders build the inner foundation that makes navigating change possible?
The foundation is built before the crisis, not during it. It requires two tracks worked simultaneously: the identity work of understanding what is driving the overdelivering pattern and separating who you are from what you produce, and the strategic work of building a team that can operate without you at the centre of every decision. Leaders who have done this work do not just survive restructurings and pivots. They navigate them from a different internal place, with clarity rather than accumulated weight.
What is the difference between a sprinting leader and a marathon leader?
A sprinting leader moves fast, absorbs everything and delivers consistently. Over time the pace becomes unsustainable because it was never designed to last. A marathon leader has done the inner work that makes pacing possible: they know what genuinely requires them, they have built a team that runs without them at the centre, and they can choose their next direction rather than simply continuing the one they are already moving in. The goal is not to stop sprinting. It is to become someone for whom slowing down is a choice rather than a collapse.
About the Author
Danguole Litvinskaite is an executive leadership coach based in Switzerland, specialising in helping exceptional and exhausted senior leaders advance without losing themselves in the process. With 14 years in investment banking across 4 countries, an ICF PCC credential, and 3,000+ executive coaching sessions, she works with senior leaders in tech, finance, consulting, and global financial institutions. Her 3-month intensive, The Integration Method, addresses the overdelivering pattern at the level where it actually lives, combining corporate strategy, leadership psychology, nervous system regulation, and career navigation. Clients include senior leaders at the largest tech companies, Big 4 firms, and global financial institutions.
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