Why Leadership Feels Heavier Than It Should

Good managers don’t fail because they lack talent.
They fail because they’re guessing.

I see this most often right after a manager takes on a bigger role. More scope. More people. More visibility. They’re capable, motivated, and working hard. From the outside, it looks like a success story in progress.

But underneath, something subtle is happening.

They’re making decisions without knowing what “good” actually looks like yet. They’re filling in gaps with assumptions. They’re trying to move fast without slowing down to confirm expectations. Not because they’re careless, but because no one wants to be the manager who needs too much guidance.

And when managers guess, the cost doesn’t disappear.
It shows up later, upstream, in the form of rework, escalation, and cleanup that lands squarely on the senior leader.

Guessing doesn’t come from incompetence.
It comes from unclear success criteria.

Most managers don’t guess because they want to. They guess because the alternative feels risky. Asking too many questions can look like insecurity. Slowing down can feel like underperforming. And in fast-moving organizations, ambiguity often masquerades as autonomy.

So managers do what capable people do under pressure. They infer. They extrapolate. They pattern-match from past roles and past leaders. They make the best call they can with incomplete information and hope they’re close enough.

Sometimes they are. Sometimes they aren’t.

The problem is that leadership roles don’t tolerate “close enough” for very long. Small misalignments compound quickly. A missed expectation here. An unspoken tradeoff there. Suddenly the senior leader is back in the weeds, correcting decisions they didn’t know were being made that way.

That’s not a failure of effort.
It’s a failure of clarity. And clarity is a leadership system, not a one-time conversation.

When managers are guessing, the work doesn’t slow down.
It shifts upward.

Decisions get escalated that shouldn’t need escalation. Work gets pulled back into your orbit that never should have required your involvement. You find yourself re-explaining context you assumed was already clear. Not because your managers are lazy or careless, but because they’re trying to avoid being wrong in the dark.

Over time, this creates a familiar pattern.

Your calendar fills with “quick check-ins” that aren’t quick. You stay closer to execution than you want to. Strategic thinking gets squeezed between operational cleanup. And the mental load of holding the full picture never really turns off.

What makes this especially frustrating is that it’s invisible at first. Nothing is obviously broken. There’s no single moment where you can point and say, this is the problem. It just feels like leadership has become heavier than it should be.

That’s the hidden cost of guessing.
Not just inefficiency, but sustained leadership drag.

The real issue isn’t that managers need more effort, experience, or motivation.

It’s that most leadership systems rely on implied expectations instead of explicit ones.

Alignment is often treated as a kickoff conversation. A few early meetings. A shared document. Maybe a standing one-on-one. After that, everyone is expected to just know how to make the right calls as the context shifts.

But leadership roles don’t stay still. Priorities change. Tradeoffs evolve. What mattered in the first 30 days isn’t what matters in month six. And when the system doesn’t force clarity to keep pace with reality, guessing becomes the default.

That’s why strong managers still create unintended drag.
Not because they’re doing the wrong work, but because they’re doing it without a stable definition of winning.

When clarity is treated as a leadership system, reinforced through routines, alignment, and intent—managers stop guessing. Decisions stay where they belong. And senior leaders get their leverage back.

The leaders who break this pattern don’t do it by hovering more or explaining harder.

They do it by designing clarity into the role itself.

They make expectations explicit instead of implied. They align on what winning looks like before decisions are made, not after. They treat upward alignment, decision context, and tradeoffs as ongoing leadership work, not something that gets handled once and forgotten.

When clarity is built into how leaders operate, managers don’t have to guess. They don’t need constant reassurance. And senior leaders don’t have to carry the system on their backs.

That’s what actually resolves the load.

So the question isn’t whether your managers are capable.
They almost certainly are.

The question is where they’re still guessing, quietly and with good intentions, because the system hasn’t made clarity unavoidable yet.

Where has leadership load crept back onto your plate, not because something is broken, but because expectations were never fully defined as the role evolved?

Cheers,
Jeff