I’ve stepped into interim leadership twice in my career. Both times I wanted the bigger role before I had it. Both times, the moment it was actually mine, I understood what I’d asked for.

One of those roles, I walked into the room thinking I was stepping into the job I’d always wanted. The title was real. The room was real. Then I started looking for the things I assumed came with it. The team. The budget I could count on. The systems already running. The people who knew where everything was kept.

None of it was there. The dream job was empty.

So I did the only thing left to do. I started rebuilding what I thought had been there from the beginning, while running the budget, the legal side, the compliance side, every small logistical detail that suddenly had my name on it. Nobody warned me that the job under the job was going to be the real one.

Here’s what I couldn’t see while I was in it. I was measuring myself against the wrong thing.

When you get the title, you start comparing. Not on purpose. It just happens. You look at the leaders you admire, the ones who seem to have it handled, and you measure your first week against their tenth year. You hold your messy middle up next to their finished headline, and of course you come up short. The comparison was rigged before you started.

The headline was never the whole story anyway. Phil Knight built Nike over decades. Read Shoe Dog and you find years where he was scraping by month to month, one bad break from the whole thing folding. The version everyone remembers is the swoosh on every shelf. The version he actually lived was mostly doubt and debt.

Jason Feifer spent years interviewing cover-story founders for Entrepreneur, and he landed on something close to this: everyone carries the doubt, but the only thing that ever gets told is the success story, never the beginning of it. So if you spend your days comparing your beginning to someone else’s ending, you lose every time. The math doesn’t work.

You get overwhelmed, staring at a running list of everything you’re not doing well, everything you don’t measure up to. And the instinct is to fix it by doing more. Do what they’re doing. Add what they added. Match the leader in the headline, move for move.

What if the answer runs the other way? What if there’s a way to lead that’s actually yours, built on the skills you already have, and the move is to do less of what everyone else does and do your own part better?

For me, the shift was small, and it was quiet. I realized I could say no. I didn’t have to carry every detail. I didn’t have to run the job the way the person before me ran it, or the way the leader I admired would have run it. I had to find my own balance, dial it in, and keep a level head while I did. That was the turn. Not a new system. Permission I hadn’t given myself.

Copying someone else is the easier move. It always will be. But you don’t get to the place where you’re bringing your best by pasting in a path that belonged to someone else. You only get there by walking your own, which is slower, and quieter, and doesn’t have a headline yet.

That’s the part nobody puts in the story.

One thing to sit with this week:

What’s something you’re doing right now that you feel like you have to do, but you wish you didn’t have to?

Don and Val were after each other again. Their argument was about documentation and whether the team should have any. The team’s practices had never been written down because they lived in heads (mostly Don’s) and in their muscle memory. But to operate at the strategic level the organization was now trying to reach, that had to change. And Val knew it.

Val wanted to write it down. Where does the manual live? Who owns it? When are we doing this? Don didn’t want to do that. If he wrote it down, it became permanent, and he wanted to preserve the ability to remember things in the way the moment required, not in the way the document said. Needing to go back to the written documentation took time that Don didn’t have. And back and forth they went.

The argument ratcheted up, their voices getting louder. Everyone in the room knew they were both loyal to their teams and both up for promotion. Everyone had seen this movie before.

The team watched. Nobody spoke up. The two leaders were locked, and the rest of the room had carefully calculated — without anyone naming the calculation — that whatever was happening between Don and Val was not their problem to interrupt.

Eventually they reached an impasse and retreated to their corners. In the days after, Val’s team went back to their work, building toward the documented future they’d been promised. Don’s team went back to theirs, working from memory the way they always had. Two teams and two strategies, both proceeding as if the meeting hadn’t happened. Val’s boss took Don to coffee later that week, trying to keep the bridge open, playing both sides while telling himself he was just managing personalities.

Did that argument change anything? Not a chance.

That meeting wasn’t a decision-making body. It was a ritual where decisions appeared to happen. Two leaders stayed loud enough to convince themselves they were letting their voices be heard. Everyone else stayed quiet enough to make sure the ritual could finish on time.

There’s a tool worth keeping on hand for moments like this. Dial It In.

On the far left is one extreme: everyone listens to everyone else, every voice gets heard, nothing gets integrated, and nothing is ever finalized. The far right is the opposite extreme: one person directs, and no one else’s input changes the outcome.

The middle, calibrated at 90 degrees, is where great work actually happens. You hear from everyone and integrate what you heard into a shared direction. Minds change. People who came in with one position leave with a different one because someone in the room made a case that landed. That’s the dialed-in response. It’s not splitting the difference. It’s having access to the full range of the dial and choosing the right position for the moment in front of you.

Don and Val weren’t dialed in. Don was parked hard at the right — I’ll decide, we’ll remember it, we don’t need it written down. Val was parked hard at the left — everyone needs visibility, everyone needs input, nothing exists until it’s documented. Both of them had real wisdom on their side of the dial. But neither of them was reaching for the middle. Neither of them was asking where am I defaulting, and what does this moment actually need from me?

The team in the room didn’t dial it in either. They’d seen this meeting before. They’d seen what happened when someone interrupted it. They had calculated that the cost of speaking up was higher than the cost of letting another ritual play out, so they stayed silent and let the dial stay stuck.

And here is the part that makes this issue what it is: that organization wasn’t a low-trust environment. It was the opposite. The culture kept so much peace that the only way around conflict was to return to peace. Real conflict — the kind where someone makes a case that changes someone else’s mind — required a kind of trust the room had never been asked to spend. So conflict got short-circuited back to surface-level peace, every time. The dial stayed stuck. The meeting kept happening on the calendar. And everyone defaulted to Don’s position because nobody wanted to be on the wrong end of him.

Too much time goes to hot air. The talking keeps going and nothing gets decided. No minds change. No new agreements form. Nothing gets built that’s stronger or better or has more vitality. The same thing keeps happening.

Immovable, rigid, stuck.

Here is what could have changed it: one person at that table could have prompted a third way.

Not necessarily a manager intervening from above or a consultant brought in to facilitate. A team member who looked at Don and Val locked at the extremes and asked the question neither of them was asking. What if it isn’t document everything or remember everything? What if the question is what specifically needs to be written down, owned by someone, and revisited so we actually remember?

The dial moves the instant someone in the room is willing to spend the trust required to ask the third-way question. The question doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be asked.

It’s not either-or. It’s “what if?”

But nobody asked. Don and Val were too rooted in their own perspectives to reach for the dial themselves. Anger, indifference, frustration, annoyance — that isn’t the state a leader calibrates from. That capacity is gone before the meeting starts. So the prompt has to come from somewhere else. It has to come from the team.

This meeting had a half-dozen people who could have asked it. And yet none of them did.

You’ve been reading this from inside that team. The silent participant who saw the ritual happen, who calculated the cost of speaking up against the cost of letting it run, who chose silence and watched the dial stay stuck.

Now read the meeting again from a different seat. The seat you actually sit in.

You are a leader. You set the stage for the room. The argument that decides nothing has probably happened in your room. Maybe last week. Maybe yesterday. The people in your room make a calculation they make about whether it’s worth speaking up, and the answer they’re landing on is the outcome you keep getting from them. Maybe they’ve stopped expecting decisions from your meetings. They started doing something else with that time a long time ago.

You haven’t noticed because, from your seat, the meeting looked like a meeting.

If that’s you, it’s never too late to dial it in.

If your team stopped expecting decisions from your meetings, when did that happen, and what did they start doing instead?

A director I know, call him Steve, was running the kind of pace where Fridays start to feel like more Tuesdays. He was constantly in meetings. New monumental, industry-shifting initiatives kept stacking up; nothing ever fell away. Team members turned over. Steve kept climbing the ranks, which sounds like good news until you notice the resources around him weren’t keeping up. He was being told, somehow, that the answer was to keep adding.

One Friday, Steve built the spreadsheet himself. One column with every strategic initiative his team currently had in motion. The total came back: 73.

Fewer than 100 employees. Seventy-three major strategic initiatives underway simultaneously.

Steve had suspected the list was long. It didn’t click until he saw the number.

The visible problem is too many priorities. Every leader who’s ever walked into Steve’s job has seen that. The deeper problem is the one nobody names out loud: the company built a system for starting and never built a system for stopping.

Look at any leadership team’s whiteboard. The to-do list lives there in plain view. New initiatives. Quarterly priorities. The strategic plan, version four. What almost never appears on the same whiteboard, in the same handwriting, is the stop-doing list. Starting authority is everywhere. Finishing authority is nowhere. The ledger is one-sided, and Steve has been keeping books on a balance sheet that only has assets.

Adding more projects to your plate isn’t going to accomplish the goals your leadership team thinks it will. They believe it will. The spreadsheet is the receipt; 73 was the balance. Every additional initiative borrows focus from the future at an interest rate nobody is tracking.

Here’s what coaching has shown me again and again: the move that breaks the loop for a director like Steve is never a new framework.

It’s permission.

Permission to stop.

Permission to take something off the board without asking three layers of approval. Permission to call a project finished even when “finished” looks different than the version the leadership team imagined six quarters ago. Permission to put a stop-doing list on the wall in his own handwriting, next to the to-do list, and to be the leader who keeps it current.

Most directors I work with can name the project they’d cut if they had permission. They’ve been carrying the candidate around for months. What they can’t yet feel is what’s on the other side of the cut.

It’s scary to start doing less: to prune something, to take something real off the schedule. That fear is the gate.

What waits past it is the part nobody describes well in advance: freedom, openness, the room to give more energy, insight, and perspective to the projects that actually matter. The most important things start getting a higher quality of your work because the work isn’t being split sixty ways anymore.

Steve’s company doesn’t need more initiatives. It needs more of Steve’s actual attention on the few that are going to matter.

And there’s a second thing worth carrying with that: if permission to stop is unavailable to you on the projects you control, the projects you don’t control aren’t moving either. The work travels in that order.

One last thing before the list goes on the wall: don’t read this as “drop a couple of projects and call it a win.” Permission to stop is the gateway, not the fix. The gaps behind this one don’t clear until this one clears. Steve has a longer list waiting after the spreadsheet. And so do you.

How many of your team’s current initiatives could finish if you stopped adding for 60 days?

Bradford works sunup to sundown.

He hops out of bed, knocks out a workout, savors the first cup of coffee. He sits down at his desk and the doubt creeps in. Again.

It isn’t anxiety. It’s recognition. Something is off, and it didn’t start this morning. It started long before the ball dropped on New Year’s Eve.

He’s in meetings all day. His team is implementing project after project. They jump from one big initiative to the next. The list of “what we’re working on” doesn’t fit on one page anymore.

Bradford has been told the answer is to work harder. Set bigger goals. Build a better strategic plan. Add the new framework. Add the new system. Add, add, add.

None of that advice is wrong on its own. The lie isn’t work hard. The lie is the answer is always addition.

The first instinct is to read Bradford’s problem as a capacity problem. He needs to be sharper. Better at prioritizing. Maybe he needs to read another time management book. The Olympic motto — Faster, Higher, Stronger — has him beat already.

He doesn’t. He needs fewer things on the page.

This isn’t a personal capacity problem. It’s a systems problem. Bradford has been carrying every initiative because no one told him he was allowed to put something down. Every quarter, the pile grows. Nothing in the system rewards finishing. Everything in the system rewards starting.

You were trained to count to 100 in school, because 100 = A+. Honor roll. Salutatorian. Valedictorian. You kept running the equation forward: more is better. 110 beats 100. 130 beats 110. The ceiling moved every year and you moved with it.

Then you got the job. Same equation: more initiatives, more accounts, more slides, more projects. More yes.

Here is what nobody told you: efficiency is not speed, or more, or faster.

Efficiency is calibration.

When a system is calibrated, every input has a known output. When a system is overdriven, every input produces less than the one before it. The line bends. Then it falls. The harder you push, the less you get back. The pushing was always Bradford’s problem.

Adding more, working harder, building bigger are all myths.

You get there by subtracting.

I learned this from a fire.

A few years ago, I was Bradford. Reading every book I could get my hands on and implementing every tactic and trick the authors offered. Until the fire came at me. I saw a flash at the backyard fire pit and jumped back. My leg was on fire. Decades of fire-safety training kicked in. Stop, drop, roll. A week at the burn clinic. Three more at home. Months of recovery after that.

In the hospital, a friend asked me a question I didn’t want to answer. What are you learning from this experience?

I had been working hard. Pushing more. Expecting results to come. The pile on my desk that morning hadn’t been calibrated. It had been accumulated.

The fire forced me to recalibrate during my recovery. Strategic vision started to click. Not a new framework. A new rhythm. One quarter at a time. One major initiative per quarter, stacked, sequential.

In four quarters: a book published in three months from inception to print. A rebrand. A new product. Another new product.

None of it would have been possible if I had tried to start them all at the same time.

The fire forced me to subtract. Subtraction produced more output than addition ever did.

This is the part that’s hard to swallow. Adding has been the cost. Subtracting is the answer.

How much are you trying to accomplish right now?

Not your team’s pile. Yours.