Why your drive for maximum capacity is costing you 50% of your employee costs.
I want you to try something that will fundamentally change how you view performance in your organisation. Walk over to your top 5 performers—the people who deliver results, drive innovation, and make things happen when it matters most. Ask them this simple question:
“If 10/10 represents maximum capacity—where you haven’t got time to breathe, take on anything new, or even think clearly—where are you right now?”
Then follow up immediately with this: “If 10/10 represents your maximum capability—everything that makes you brilliant, the reason we hired you, and the secret sauce our business desperately needs—how much of that capability are you actually able to bring to work each day?”
Brace yourself for what comes next.
If your top performers are anything like the 350 leaders I’ve worked with in 2025, they’ll tell you they’re operating at 9/10 or 10/10 capacity—absolutely maxed out, drowning in commitments, unable to take on another single thing. Yet when it comes to capability? They’re bringing perhaps 50-60% of what they’re truly capable of to their role.
Stop. Let that sink in properly.
Your most critical people—the ones your success depends upon—are working with one hand tied behind their back. They’re not failing you; you’re failing them. They’re busy, frantically busy, but they’re busy with the wrong things. Tasks that drain rather than energise. Activities that hinder rather than help. Meetings that suck the life out of productivity rather than spark innovation.
This isn’t just inefficiency—it’s organisational suicide in slow motion.
Here’s what’s coming next, and it’s as predictable as it is devastating: these exceptional people will burn out. They’ll become demotivated. Their spark will dim. And eventually, inevitably, they’ll leave. The very performance culture you think you’re building is actually driving away your best talent.
But here’s the maddening part—whilst this crisis unfolds, where are most companies directing their energy? They’re cutting travel budgets. Slashing development programmes. Eliminating face-to-face meetings. In other words, they’re systematically removing the very things that energise, motivate, and unleash their key people.
Instead, these talented individuals spend increasing amounts of time trapped in low-value meetings, creating reports to satisfy board members who want to see output numbers, rather than investing their brilliance in leading the input metrics that actually drive those outputs. We’ve created a culture where busy work masquerades as productivity, and activity is confused with achievement.
The companies that are absolutely flying right now? They’re doing the complete opposite.
They’re investing more heavily in face-to-face off-sites. They’re working systematically to identify and remove the blockers that prevent high-performing teams from collaborating effectively. They’re ruthlessly eliminating the distractions that waste thousands of hours on low-value work. Most importantly, they’re having the courage to prioritise the initiatives that will genuinely add value, rather than hedging their bets across hundreds of projects that dilute focus and fragment energy.
These organisations understand something fundamental: true performance leadership isn’t about doing more things—it’s about creating the conditions for your people to do fewer things brilliantly.
This is your moment. Right now, in 2025, whilst your competitors are cutting corners and constraining their talent, you have an opportunity to be genuinely brave. Your leaders are crying out for you to make the hard decisions that will create space for them to be extraordinary.
Think about it differently. Performance isn’t about cramming more into already overflowing schedules. It’s about creating the psychological and practical space for brilliance to emerge. It’s about protecting your best people from the thousand small distractions that erode their effectiveness. It’s about saying no to good opportunities so you can say yes to great ones.
The question that should keep you awake at night isn’t “Are my people busy enough?” It’s “How many of my team wake up with a spring in their step because they’re genuinely excited about the work ahead, rather than weighed down by a diary that drains the blood from their face?”
Your top performers joined your organisation to make a difference, to use their talents, to create something meaningful. Instead, you’ve buried them under administrative tasks, pointless meetings, and busywork that would be better handled by others or eliminated entirely.
Here’s what champions do differently: they protect their talent ferociously. They create environments where capability flourishes rather than withers. They understand that their role isn’t to keep everyone busy—it’s to ensure their best people can operate in their zone of genius as much as humanly possible.
Stop managing capacity and start unleashing capability. Your people are desperate for you to be brave enough to clear the path so they can run.
The companies that get this right won’t just survive the challenges ahead—they’ll absolutely dominate their markets whilst their competitors wonder what happened.
