Executive Quicksand

You’ve worked so hard to get where you are.  You put in countless hours.  You’ve attended conferences and educational events to build your knowledge. You’ve been scrappy and jumped in to learn how to do things.  You are a high performer.

Now you’ve “made it”!  You might be an administrator, an owner of a practice, or even the president of your board. You are in the leadership position you’ve always dreamed about.

Is it what you expected it to be?

In working with hundreds of businesses, a disturbing pattern I’ve seen is that many people who have “made it” to key executive roles arrive only to find that they have lost control over their own time.  We work harder and harder only to be tasked with more and more responsibility.  The result is dramatic.  One study found that 82% of executives have experienced exhaustion that contributed to burnout in their roles.

(source: https://www.quantumworkplace.com/future-of-work/employee-burnout-trends-strategies)

You’ve achieved your dream job, but sometimes it feels like a nightmare. You are stuck.  You work harder and harder only to sink deeper and deeper into problems.  We call this Executive Quicksand.

The good news is that there is a solution to this problem and the answer is not just to work harder.  As anyone who watched Gilligan’s Island knows, if you struggle in quicksand, you just sink deeper.  The only way out of quicksand is to get help from the outside.

You need help from the people around you.  You need to create structures, systems, roles, and goals that empower others to make decisions.   Just imagine a world where you are working hard with a trusted team to solve problems together.  It’s a world where your team takes ownership to find solutions to problems and where you have space to do your real job of providing high-level executive leadership.

Creating a healthy, trusted team takes work and that work starts with you identifying that you have a problem, and that problem is you.  You will have to start by recognizing that other people are smart and capable.  You will have to learn to stop hoarding problems.  You will have to learn to delegate and trust other people to do the right things.  You will have to learn how to build accountability systems with clear roles and goals where day-to-day success, or failure, is clear.

You’ve made it to an executive position, but if you are in the quicksand, not only are you miserable, but your practice isn’t getting the results you need.

Want to learn more?  I will be talking about Executive Quicksand and how to get out of it at the National AAOE Conference in Atlanta in May 2025.  Come see my session and take the first step to taking your job, your practice, and your life back.   

Don Harkey is the CEO and Co-Founder of People Centric Consulting Group based in Springfield, Missouri.  Don and his team work with clients across the US to build healthy organizations where people are empowered and aligned.  Don is also an author (his first book, Becoming People Centric, comes out in March 2025) and a popular keynote speaker