From Busy to High Impact: The Leadership Shift That Unlocks Senior Roles
- Sabine Roberts
- Oct 10
- 4 min read
Updated: Oct 14
From Busy to High Impact: The Leadership Shift That Unlocks Senior Roles
Early in your career you get noticed for hard work. You are responsive, you ship, you take on more. Busy bees get promoted. Then, at some point, the recipe stops working. You are still delivering, but the step up does not come. What changed? Senior roles reward impact, not activity.
Why busyness stalls out
Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal tracked managers for years and found a hard truth: most are very busy but not very effective. Only a small minority consistently focus energy on the work that truly moves performance. Activity creates the feeling of progress, but it often hides the absence of strategic impact. Harvard Business Review
At the top, time becomes the scarcest resource and the way leaders spend it shapes the whole company. Research that shadowed chief executives week by week shows that effective leaders deliberately shift time toward setting direction, developing people, and making a few consequential decisions rather than doing more of everything. Harvard Business Review
Boards and investors also reward value creation, not motion. Companies that regularly move resources to the best opportunities outperform those that leave budgets on autopilot. The lesson is simple: senior leadership is disciplined capital allocation, not busyness. This builds on my first article: the missing 33 percent is about linking choices to P&L, cash, and capacity and reallocating accordingly. McKinsey & Company
The shift: from doing more to creating more
From tasks to outcomes: Define success in terms of value created, not work completed.
From owning work to shaping portfolios: Help stop lower value initiatives to fund higher value ones.
From participation to decisions: Push for clear decision rights, owners, and timelines so choices turn into action. The RAPID framework helps you spell out roles and responsibilites: who recommends, who agrees, who gives input, who decides, and who delivers. Bain
What this looks like in practice
Run an impact agenda for your week
Plan your time around three questions: What decision am I moving this week? What capital or capacity am I freeing up or redeploying? What talent am I growing to increase future capacity? If your calendar does not match your answers, change the calendar. Harvard Business Review
Reframe every proposal in value terms
Replace “here is the work” with “here is the value.” Use one page that shows: impact on revenue and margin, cash timing, execution load by team, and one line of market context. You do not need a large model to make a strong recommendation.
Practice resource reallocation in small
Each quarter, stop or shrink something to fund something better. Document the trade. Over time you build the muscle that outperforms. McKinsey & Company
Make decisions move
If a meeting cannot end with a decision, downgrade it to a working session. If it must end with a decision, assign the decider in advance, list the input roles, and state the date. That is RAPID in plain English. Bain
A quick self-check
Do my updates describe outcomes (value, cash, capacity) or activity (tasks, meetings, volume)?
In the last month, did I stop anything to fund a higher return option?
Can I point to one decision I accelerated by framing it in P&L, cash, and capacity terms?
Does my calendar reflect my impact agenda, or am I defaulting to busyness?
Ninety-day plan to make the shift
Weeks 1–2: Audit your calendar and meetings. Cut or combine low-value sessions. Reserve two weekly blocks for decision prep and follow-through.
Weeks 3–6: For one live initiative, circulate a one-page decision memo that shows P and L, cash, capacity, and market context with two or three options and a clear recommendation.
Weeks 7–10: Propose a small resource reallocation (fund A by reducing B). Track the outcome and share the learning.
Weeks 11–12: Introduce simple decision roles on a recurring cross-functional topic so meetings end with a committed choice and owner.
Final recommendation: Don’t forget to adjust your language
In board, CEO, and SLT conversations, speak in outcomes, not effort. Replace counts of tasks and meetings with the change in value, cash, and capacity, framed in market context. The question to answer every time is simple: What moved and by how much, by when, and what did we stop to fund it?
Swap activity for impact
From: “We ran nine workshops and met three vendors.”
To: “We reduced time to onboard by two weeks, freeing capacity in Customer Ops and lifting cash by bringing revenue forward next month.”
From: “The team closed 14 tickets and shipped a new dashboard.”
To: “We cut churn risk in the top ten accounts and lifted contribution by 300k this quarter; the dashboard removed two manual reports, freeing one day per week for the sales analysts.”
From: “We launched a pilot in Market A.”
To: “Unit economics are positive after channel fees; working capital exposure is 500k, and payback is in seven months if we expand on week twelve.”
From: “We automated process X.”
To: “This removes the equivalent of 1.4 full time roles, improves service levels by twenty percent, and releases capacity for Project X.”
Further reading
Beware the Busy Manager: why activity is a poor proxy for effectiveness. Harvard Business Review
How CEOs Manage Time: what effective leaders actually spend time on. Harvard Business Review
How Nimble Resource Allocation Can Double Your Company’s Value: the performance payoff from moving resources. McKinsey & Company
Admit It, Your Investments Are Stuck in Neutral: practical ways to reallocate capital faster. McKinsey & Company
RAPID Decision Making: clarifying who recommends, who decides, and who executes. Bain
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