Roger Delves, Alison Reynolds
August 12, 2026
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Why overdoing is failing leaders
Open any laptop, tablet or smartphone and you will find a clever To-Do app designed to make you more efficient and effective at doing all the things that life and work demand of you each day. If we can hack our time, biohack our energy – ideally both – we will make it, won’t we? While it may be a momentary relief to believe the system can be beaten by clever apps or our energy preserved by infra-red face masks, it adds up to the same thing – we are overdoing it.
For many of the people we have spoken to throughout our research with leaders at Hult Ashridge Executive Education, overdoing it feels like overwhelm. Too much information, never feeling on top of things, back-to-back meetings, the always-on culture, exhaustion and the depletion of our resilience levels. Individually it creates unwellness and systemically it perpetuates inequity, invisibly.
Who is overdoing it?
Like so many things, the overdoing it crisis impacts everyone, but some more than others. After all, who is best placed to sustain this overdoing it the longest? Who has the most advantage when it comes to conforming to the invisible norms and reaping the rewards?
This was a question posed to a divisional leadership team of a bank we worked with. This team had worked together for several years and was relatively diverse in some respects. As part of our work around power, we asked them to stand in a horizontal line and take a step forward or back in response to a series of prompts which included:
If you have someone at home who is the primary carer for your children or family, take one step forward
If you find it easy to contribute during the meetings you attend and when you do, you feel heard, take one step forward
If you have ever received a compliment at work that you felt reduced your power or undermined your confidence, take one step back
If you have visible or invisible disabilities, take one step back
Within a few minutes there was a clear distinction in the room. Most of the men were further forward, and most of the women were further back. After each question we paused and heard some of the stories behind what caused someone to move backward. It included being a carer for a mother with dementia, having a teenager out of education with a mental health issue, having a trauma-induced brain injury and therefore needing rest and time to recover. The most shocking thing to us? None of these enormous life challenges were known to others within the group until our exercise.
There are two ways to get help. One is to ask for it; the other is to be asked if you need it. If both these routes fail, overdoing it can feel like the only way forward.
Doing doesn’t make us different
Being good at doing is self-evidently a necessary skill for leaders in today’s hectic, complex, transactional and information-saturated world. However, the harsh truth is that for leaders, doing is a hygiene factor.
What makes leaders stand out – what makes them followable – is being a motivational, inspirational role model who can create the conditions for others to be their creative, purposeful selves.
But are leaders today genuinely encouraged and rewarded by their seniors when they take this approach? Too often, the answer is that the tyranny of the urgent and the imperative of transactional action means that leaders, whatever an organization might claim to the contrary, are still rewarded for doing above all.
How can leaders become truly human-centered?
Human being is a leadership approach that values bottom line results every bit as much as the more transactional human doing approach. It simply believes that the best way to bottom line success is to couch the necessary transactional leadership within a wider human-centered approach. This allows team members to feel safe, trusted, and valued, with a sense of autonomy and self-efficacy that enables them to show up and contribute, fully. This is even more important in highly challenging circumstances, where research shows empathetic leadership can help to turn these into opportunities for post-traumatic growth.
This approach will naturally be different and individual for each leader, but some behaviors to cultivate it include exploring our inner landscape to build self-awareness. This can be done through mindful reflection to check in on how our human being is getting along.
Similarly, leaders can consciously redress the balance between advocating for their own position or opinion (the norm) and inquiring into the perspective of others. Being fully present as an open, accepting witness to others helps with emotion processing and creating the conditions for change.
Finally, when we disclose aspects of ourselves, such as our observations, fears, disappointments, or mistakes, it creates intimacy. In the world of work, a question bubbling up from everyone’s subconscious is often some version of:
"What parts of me are acceptable here?” When leaders share parts of themselves, the answer to this question becomes more expansive for everyone.
An important point to note is that affection within a team is nice to have when it happens naturally, but it is not a requirement in a high-performing team. In fact, we cannot always lead people properly if we require them to like us. Instead, what is necessary is for everyone in the team to respect and trust every other team member, including the leader.
This may feel daunting to achieve, but the most vital ingredients are time to invest in supporting a human-centered approach, as well as buy-in from management, the leader and the team.
A checklist to help leaders move from human doing to human being:
Keep space in your schedule for unplanned human being moments:
Leaders need ideally 50% of their schedule as discretionary time – not scheduled or committed to task completion and therefore available to commit to the interpersonal elements of human being leadership. These are often unplanned and emergent, for example someone needing support. And these moments really make a difference. As Maya Angelou is known to have said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Leaders can reflect on this provocation: how do you think your team members feel about you – and what are you doing about it?Prioritize areas where you add unique value:
Leaders should look at their role and all the different things that they could be doing at any one time and ask themselves, “Where can I add value?”. When they have isolated those actions or activities they need to ask, “Where can only I add value?” These are the areas – and they will be human being areas – where time should be invested. To support this, teams must understand and support a management-by-exception style of leadership, whereby leaders only intervene where results deviate significantly from expectation or budgets.Find purpose in your leadership:
Leading without purpose can make the leadership look and feel pointless and reactive. When leaders lead as human beings, their teams experience them as more purposeful, with everything that they do or say contributing to that shared sense of purpose. Purpose gets us out of bed in the morning and drives our engagement at work. It is not impossible to lead without purpose, but it is like trying to climb a mountain in slippers with rocks in your backpack.
In workplaces led by human beings we find healthier, more resilient, less stressed, more engaged teams and individuals. Performance levels are higher, and the ability to meet targets and to overcome difficulties is enhanced. Leaders are more focused and spend their time better. They are more capable of inspiring and motivating their team. It is strong human-centered relationships that move teams beyond the transactional success of meeting targets into the transformational success of performing beyond reasonable expectations – and feeling good about it.
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First published in the DLQ50 Hult Ashridge Executive Education Supplement, Ideas for Leaders.
Access the full publication for new insights from leadership experts, spanning burnout, global crises, the risk of over-optimization – and the human being advantage.
Meet the experts
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Roger Delves
Professor of Practice in Leadership & Management at Hult International Business School
Roger joined Ashridge in 2008. He has taught extensively internationally and in the UK, designing and leading many tailored and qualifications courses.
Roger co-authored a 2014 book for Pearson, Top 50 Management Dilemmas, and co-edited Inspiring Leadership for Bloomsbury in 2018. He also wrote a chapter in the 2021 Springer Compendium Leadership after Covid-19, and is on the Advisory Board of Developing Leaders Quarterly (DLQ).
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Alison Reynolds
Associate Professor of Practice at Hult International Business School
Alison is a member of Faculty at Hult International Business School where she designs and delivers executive education and consulting initiatives. In 2019 Alison was announced on the Thinkers50 Radar, recognising her work on Cognitive Diversity.
Alison is an active researcher and writer, her work featuring consistently in Harvard Business Review. Her first book, ‘What Philosophy can teach you about being a better leader’ was published with Kogan Page in October 2019 and the second, ‘The Qi Effect: Unlocking the Power of Interaction’ is due in 2020. Alison co-developed the Qi Index, a tool used by organisations worldwide to better understand the quality of their interaction.
Alison previously worked for Deloitte consulting where she led transformation initiatives for a variety of long term clients. Prior to this she worked in both corporate and policy environments within the UK Government.
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