The Hidden Work Tax

Early in my career I worked in management at a distribution company. Orders moved down a conveyor by the thousands. The job required a specific number of people at specific points, and if we were short even one, the system told us instantly. The conveyor jammed. Alarms rang. Merchandise hit the floor. It was reminiscent of (but not as funny as) the classic I Love Lucy episode in which she’s shoveling chocolates into her mouth to keep the conveyor moving.

The beauty of that workplace was it was never debatable if things were going well. They either were or weren’t. Alarms, broken boxes and jammed conveyor belts were the arbiter.

In so many workplaces today, however, no such clarity exists.

When knowledge or service work starts to break down, so often people just absorb it. Someone eats lunch at their desk. A manager takes on one more decision that should have been made two levels down. A team builds a spreadsheet outside the system because the system won't do the thing they need. Two departments sort out a priority conflict in a Slack thread on a Sunday. A high performer covers another gap. A customer waits three extra days and nobody logs it anywhere.

The work gets done. Nothing beeps.

We're Putting In Everything We Know to Put In

I hear a version of the same thing from senior leaders often enough now that I've stopped hearing it as a complaint. The strategy is sound. We’ve hired great people. There's been real investment in leadership development, in technology, in tooling. People are working harder than they were three years ago. And still.

We're putting in everything we know to put in, but either our results feel insufficient, or our people are absolutely breaking down, or both.

Leaders aren’t wondering whether their people are struggling. They know it for sure. Every explanation they've been handed just points at the people. Burnout calls for resilience training. Conflict calls for communication skills. Slow delivery calls for accountability. Change fatigue calls for change management. And while those interventions are worthwhile, they’re also insufficient. They presume the “fixes” are all the responsibility of the workforce.

The Tax

Leaders own the strategy. They set the vision, the goals, targets, priorities. Once those are sharp and tight, their teams should be able to execute. Sure, there will be some complexity to navigate. Challenging targets to achieve, negotiation between peers over resources, collaboration between teams, difficult decisions to make. But that's the work their smart, capable people have been hired to do.

And sometimes, in fact, it is doable.

Sometimes it's doable at a cost nobody's counting. The overnights. The heroics that get celebrated at the all-hands. The interteam battles over resources everyone genuinely needs. The corners cut on quality or safety because there was no other way to hit the date. The weeks spent waiting on a decision that keeps getting deferred.

And sometimes it isn't doable at all. Two priorities thrown at the same people at the same time. Targets that don't survive arithmetic once you count the hands and the tools actually available. A mandate to experiment with AI alongside a standard that permits no errors.

Wherever a team lands on that spectrum, the conditions creating the strain tend to look small. Niggly. Unsexy. Not the kind of thing that warrants a leader's attention. So when someone raises an issue, it gets swatted away. Do you want me to do your job for you? Eventually people stop raising them at all.

The cost is enormous, and almost none of it shows up where you'd look for it. Energy and will burned navigating broken processes. Hours spent relitigating decisions that were never really made. The exhaustion that follows people home. The risks absorbed to protect a date. And all the creativity and invention we never see, because it was spent paying the tax instead.

Nobody's Job

None of this persists because of laziness or malice. It persists because attending to these conditions has never been named as work.

Strategy and execution both have owners. The conditions in between don’t, so they fall to whoever runs into them first, usually someone with no standing to make a fix hold.

Things sound different at different altitudes. Priorities set in a boardroom sound clear and reasonable. It’s only a problem once they’re in implementation — joining 17 other priorities, several unplanned requests from other stakeholders, a hiring freeze, a system that doesn't quite do what anyone needs, and two peer teams who were told something slightly different. Nobody upstairs is holding all of that at once. So from up there, nothing looks broken.

When it does get raised, the response I hear most often is some version of this. I know people are stretched. I know it's a lot. But this is what it is. We can't lower expectations and we can't slow down.

I'm not asking anyone to lower expectations or slow down. I'm asking them to look at the conditions their people are working in and take out as much friction as they can, so their teams can actually run at full speed toward the bar that's been set.

Inspect the Work

A plant manager would never look at a jammed conveyor and start by asking whether the operator lacks resilience. They would inspect the machine. Somewhere along the way, modern work reversed that order. When results slip, we look at the people first, and frequently we look nowhere else.

Inspecting the work means asking four questions, and asking them again as circumstances change.

How we win

Are goals, targets and incentives compatible with one another? Sales gets paid on volume while operations gets measured on profit. Marketing and product build their plans from different revenue numbers. A target gets set that doesn't survive the math once you count the hands available to deliver it.

How we plan

Are timelines, skills and dependencies grounded in something real? Headcount gets approved with no adjustment to the deliverable. A reorg lands and the delivery dates stay exactly where they were. Four projects need the same specialist, and none of the four plans accounts for the other three.

How we move

Are decision rights, processes and handoffs clear? A week of cascading reviews produces no decision. Countless meetings and hours of preparation for many, with little impact or direction to emerge. Empowerment gets talked about while every consequential call still travels to the top.

How we learn

Are we capturing what experience is teaching us? The same friction point returns every quarter because nobody went back and looked at it. Customer feedback keeps arriving and nothing changes. Timeline risk goes unflagged because flagging feels like volunteering for blame.

Around all four sits how we interpret. The communication and sense-making that keeps strategy honest against what's actually true on the ground. It runs through the other four continuously rather than following them.

Conditions keep shifting, so the questions keep coming back. Every new project, tool, acquisition and strategic pivot moves the dependencies and the decision rights and the tradeoffs around. We're mostly still diagnosing performance as though the work sits still and only the people vary.

Develop the People. Design the Work. Do Both.

None of this argues against building capability. Teach collaboration. Build resilience. Hold people to a high bar.

And while you're at it, ask how much of what you're calling collaboration is an adaptation to a broken system. Ask the same about resilience, and about influencing without authority. Those skills are real and worth having. They are also, a great deal of the time, compensation for conditions that could have been designed differently.

We have a discipline for designing the organization. We don't have one for designing the work that happens inside it.

There's No Silver Bullet, Which Is Good News

Leaders facing something this diffuse understandably want one big fix. A pill.

What works looks more like a capsule. Hundreds of small granules. Ten minutes spent naming which priority wins this month. One fewer door for incoming requests. One review meeting converted into a decision. One dependency named out loud before two teams discover it the hard way. None of it requires a budget, a reorg or a program with a name.

The conveyor had one advantage we've never rebuilt for this kind of work. When a condition went missing, it told us.

No alarms are going to ring. Inspect the work anyway.

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