If your leadership strategy relies on managers “just coping”, that’s not leadership development, that’s organisational denial. When priorities keep stacking, and nothing gets removed, managers become the shock absorbers… and leadership turns into survival mode.
The uncomfortable truth: your system is setting managers up to fail
Most workplaces don’t choose to overload managers. It happens one “urgent” priority at a time. Change speeds up, expectations rise, and the manager’s role becomes the landing pad for everything the organisation can’t properly resource, decide, or simplify. So, managers end up doing more coordination than leadership.
“A bad system will beat a good person every time.”
– W. Edwards Deming
Here’s the thing: this isn’t mainly a capability gap – it’s a systems failure. Your leadership operating system hasn’t been redesigned for today’s reality: constant change, hybrid complexity, tighter budgets, and higher emotional load. We keep adding “fixes” (training, wellbeing, toolkits)… without changing the conditions managers are leading inside.
If you’re still running leadership like it’s 1999, don’t be surprised when you lose your best people, performance slips where it matters most, and your margins take the hit.
It’s a little bit like trying to run the latest software on an old operating system: everything slows down, glitches, and eventually crashes, no matter how hard you press “refresh.”
From “HR, fix our managers” to “our leadership system is the real issue”
A while back, an FMCG client called me in because their “leadership pipeline was broken.” High performers were burning out, middle managers were getting prickly, and every engagement survey comment sounded like: “We’re drowning, and no one is listening.” HR was working overtime: more training, more comms, more wellbeing initiatives. But the pressure kept coming from operations: new targets, new reporting, new rollouts, all at once.
The shift happened when we stopped treating it like an HR problem and named it for what it was: a systems failure. Same people, same intent, but a different diagnosis. And suddenly the conversation moved from “How do we fix our managers?” to “What are we asking managers to carry that the system should be carrying?”
Research by W. Edwards Deming (one of the original quality and systems thinkers) put it bluntly: he estimated that “94%” of troubles and improvement opportunities belong to the system, not the individual.
The Four-Quadrant Reality Check
Ken Wilber’s Integral view holds that human performance occurs in four interconnected arenas – what’s going on inside a person, what’s observable in their behaviour, what’s shared between people, and the systems they operate within:
Here’s how to use the model: when leadership is struggling, most organisations do the easy handball: they throw it to HR to “fix” with mindset work, resilience, training, coaching (the Interior + Individual quadrants). And yes, those matter, but they’re only half the picture.
If you want leadership to stick, you have to work all four quadrants: the individual’s mindset and skills, the Collective Interior (culture, trust, norms), and the Collective Exterior (systems, structures, incentives). Because you can’t coach someone into thriving inside a system that’s overloaded, contradictory, or rewarding the wrong behaviours.
“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets”
– A systems principle
The “Before You Blame Your Managers” Systems Checklist
Five fast checks to spot whether you’ve got a leadership issue… or a leadership system issue
1. Priority load – What did we stop when we started this?
Do a quick Stop/Start decision in your next leadership meeting (one thing to stop, not “sometime soon”).
Make the priority order visible (so managers aren’t juggling ten “number ones”).
2. Manager bandwidth – How much time is left for actual leadership?
Ask managers to do a 1-week snapshot: admin/firefighting vs coaching/1:1s/development.
Protect 2 leadership blocks/week (even 2 x 45 mins) and treat them like delivery-critical work.
3. Reinforcement – What happens after the training?
Set a 30-60-90 day follow-through (one habit, weekly prompt, leader-of-leader check-in).
Give managers a one-page field guide (scripts + questions) so it transfers to real conversations.
4. Signals – What do we actually reward here?
Audit praise/promotion: are you rewarding busyness and responsiveness or leadership behaviours?
Add one leadership behaviour into performance check-ins (and talk about it, not just tick a box).
5. Cadence – Is it embedded in meetings and 1:1s?
Add a 5-minute leadership moment to weekly meetings (one question + one commitment).
Standardise 1:1s with a simple rhythm: wins → blockers → development → support.
If this is hitting close to home, don’t “add another initiative”, let’s diagnose the system. Register for my webinar and bring your toughest manager challenge; I’ll walk you through where the load is coming from and what to redesign first.
Join our exclusive webcast on 17th February
Change Has Outpaced Leadership: How to Lift Performance Through Constant Change – Without Burning Out Your Managers
Tuesday 17th February, 12.00pm – 12.45pm AEDT (Melbourne) on Zoom