A director I know was running the kind of pace where Fridays start to feel like more Tuesdays. Let’s call him Steve.
Steve 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: 49.
Fewer than 100 employees. Forty-nine 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.
Here’s my question for you this week: How many of your team's current initiatives could finish if you stopped adding anything else for 60 days?
