# Eliminating Busyness: Strategic Clarity for Leaders

**Podcast:** LEITWOLF Podcast - Leadership, Führung & Management
**Published:** 2026-02-12

## Transcript

Activity is confused with impact.
Your team, when too busy, doesn't need more pressure.
It needs more clarity, more courage to decide, and less busy work.
Hello and welcome to today's Light Wolf Podcast.
Your podcast for leading with impact.
Today we are addressing one of the most common problems that my cooperation partners and myself are encountering these days when we work with clients on leadership.
When I look around the patch and look around the clients we are working with these days, where we are hearing comments like this: people are tired, my team is working hard, but results are falling short of expectations.
I see a couple of common red threats, a common of potential root causes.
One of them is activity is confused with impact.
Meetings.
Meetings with no impact.
Some complain about emails.
They describe how some people write emails of three pages that are all over the place, unclear, not to the point, and often don't even get read.
They may have spent an hour writing it, and then the reader spends 10 seconds just scrapping scrapping it because they are just bored to death with three three-page emails.
Others get all upset when they get one-word emails, yes, no, yesterday, tomorrow, and are not used to that kind of brevity.
The intent probably is to be efficient.
The impact might be well, this is rude.
Sometimes people describe issues all around slides, meeting preparation.
They receive unclear briefings, they write unclear slides, they pack all kinds of information into it, they give, they share decks with more than a hundred slides.
Well, who on earth will ever follow and get excited about a presentation with more than a hundred slides.
So that's what people complain about.
Everything feels busy, but nothing is really productive.
Everyone's working.
Many people work hard, many people work long hours, but no one can really clearly say what result truly matters this week.
So that's one root cause.
Activity confused with impact.
Another quite common phenomenon I occasionally observe is that there are too many priorities.
Sometimes way too many priorities, which means there is no priority at all.
I will never forget the year 2018 when I'm invited to a client with 7,000 employees, and I'm working with the top 12 leaders running a Lightwolf leadership program for three days.
Invited to the dinner the night before, people are cynical and get increasingly cynical in their comments as the night goes on.
And around 10 p.m.
I'm just done.
I get exhausted.
These are the top 12 of 7,000 people.
I've never seen people talking about their own employer in such a cynical manner.
So I really got exhausted.
I went to bed and couldn't understand until the next morning when I just asked in the context of a conversation about leadership and strategy and the connection.
I asked, okay, so let me ask a question, guys.
How many strategic priorities do you have in your company strategy?
And the strategy director raises his hands and says, 32.
And I went like, no, no, sorry, misunderstanding.
I didn't mean your to-do list.
I didn't mean your priority list.
I was asking for the number of strategic priorities in your company strategy.
And I never forget he bumped his fist on the table.
BAM.
Stefan, that's why we are so frustrated.
That's what I mean.
We have 32 different priorities in the company strategy.
And everyone is as important as the other.
Unquote.
And I went like, oh God.
Oh my God.
In that moment, I understood why they were so cynical and so frustrated the night before.
How on earth can you be a leader of a company and allow your leadership team to work on 32 different priorities without anyone being able to articulate what's more important than the other?
In that moment, I understood why they were so frustrated.
Because when everything's important, nothing is important anymore.
Teams lose focus and they get lost in day-to-day operations.
So that's the second common root cause I see that causes busyness rather than productivity.
And another common topic is vagueness.
Leadership remains vague instead of creating clarity.
There are indications and there is sugarcoating all over the place just to avoid being uncomfortable to people, right?
Well intended, but fatal.
Conflicts that could be used productively to get the best ideas surfaced, they get avoided.
They get denied, right?
Just this afternoon I had a conversation with a client where one of my cooperation partners is running a two-day workshop tomorrow and the day after.
And the briefing again confirmed.
Hey Stefan, when I ask team A and Team B what they think about collaboration, they complain a lot.
A about B and B about A.
But as soon as I get them both into my office and I put the elephant on the table, they all just deny and say, I know.
It's all good here, it's all nice here.
So they deny the conflict rather than having it.
And this denial of a productive conflict is just fatal.
Because good ideas remain hidden just because people are too comfortable to go through conflict.
Decisions are being postponed.
Time and time again, people look for another evidence and another evidence and another piece of information.
Rather than taking the decision that is oftentimes very clear and transparent on the table.
All it needs is to take the decision, but it gets postponed because it's more comfortable and more reassuring and more whatever to postpone the decision yet one more time.
And expectations are phrased too softly.
They remain vague and indicative rather than clear.
Being busy is comfortable.
Delivering results is uncomfortable.
So that's my top line assessment on why sometimes teams can get busy without being productive.
And I would have three simple tips for you that when I look across the patch, my own experience in the corporate world, as a young guy, as an intern, as a director, as a general manager running 12,000 people, and later on also as a founder of two startups, different environments, different industries, different sizes of companies.
But those three tips that I'm sharing with you today, I think they would they might work across any kind of business.
Tip number one: define results, not tasks.
Don't ask what are you working on.
Ask instead what will be measurably different at the end of this week, or when delegating.
Either when you're on the receiving end and your line manager or someone else delegates a responsibility to you, or when you are the one delegating responsibility to others.
Define the result you want.
What is success?
What result do you expect the other person to deliver?
In what quality?
By what day?
If you can't say that clearly, you're not done with your preparation.
And then you will produce unclarity and busyness.
Don't worry if you're not clear yet.
Because sometimes it can be quite demanding to get to that clarity.
Because by deciding for one result, you have to say no to all other results.
And by defining one kind of quality of the result, you implicitly have to say no to all the others.
When you delegate, no matter whether you're receiving responsibility or you're defining it and giving it to someone else, please make sure that you don't just define work to do.
Please define the result you expect.
What result do you expect the other person to deliver?
In what quality by what day?
If you do that, you will create clarity on the other side.
You will eliminate some work behind that clarity that otherwise would be done and wasted because it's not needed.
But I also agree that that kind of clarity, this is success, that is the outcome by day one, by day X, may be demanding at times.
And it may require you to say no to many alternatives.
But that's exactly the kind of pre-work that we as leaders need to do.
We need to give people clarity.
And if we delegate responsibility, we need to be clear about success up front before we meet people for a delegation conversation.
And I agree, it's sometimes it's difficult.
And if we are not clear yet, if you're not clear yet on what you really want, then please don't delegate yet.
You're not ready with your preparation.
Maybe you just need to think a bit and maybe iterate another one or two times in order to get to the clarity so that you can make your own decision on what you really want before you delegate.
So that's one simple trick to get to more clarity.
The other one is when you delegate to someone else.
If, for example, I was your employee, I was your teammate, and you were delegating responsibility to me, and you've just told me, Look, Stefan, this is what I'd like to get from you.
That's the result, that's the quality, and this is the day.
And this is why it really matters a lot for our company and for your development.
So then you make me talk.
You make me talk.
And at the end of me talking, when we are at the end of what I can tell you today, you just ask, okay, Stefan, terrific conversation.
Would you mind just recapping?
What are the next steps?
What will you achieve by when?
And then me playing back what I've taken over to you, you, my boss, that is closing the deal, right?
Then you create clarity up front with the clear expectation.
And you create clarity at the end of the conversation by me recapping and playing back to you what I will deliver to you by when.
So that's what I suggest to you.
Only then clarity can emerge about expectations and results.
And the result has a clear state, a clear description of what comes out.
Everything else, everything that's not clear is busyness.
So that's one thing I really recommend to create clarity and to avoid busyness.
And you may also want to link the result you expect from me to clear benefits for the customer, for the team, for our company, or for me, for my growth, for my development.
That helps me buy in.
It helps me see why.
And all those things just increase my motivation.
Give me, give your team the freedom on the how.
The way how I do the work should be my decision.
But please be clear and unmistakably consistent in the what.
What is success?
That's what you need to define for me.
So let's illustrate this with an example.
Please don't say, hey, we are preparing a presentation.
Can you please do the work?
That's not really helpful.
It would be much more helpful, I think, if you told me, look, by Friday in two weeks' time, we will help our board to make a clear, well-informed investment decision with far-reaching consequences.
You might be talking about millions or even double-digit millions.
Everything that does not contribute to preparing this decision for the time being is stopped and postponed until further notice.
And your role is to please prepare this investment decision for the board.
And the means we will use in order to share the presentation and the preparation is a five-slide deck that illustrates and contains everything the board needs to know in their language, in their perspective, condensed.
The most relevant things are inside, precise and brief.
And they will be included in the deck as a backup.
So that's clear.
But it's tough, particularly if you talk about major investments, maybe in complex environments.
It's easy to have a hundred slides.
It's tough to condense it all into five slides.
But that's the work.
And that's the work you expect your team to produce.
So it's not about please prepare a presentation, but please prepare our board with the best and most succinct output we can produce to take a clear and far-reaching investment decision.
So this is number one.
Define results, not tasks.
Tip number two, radically reduce priorities.
Maximum three.
Per year, per month, per week, per team.
Define a maximum of ideally three essential results for the long term, the midterm, and the short term.
Everything beyond that is deliberately secondary to those three.
Focus is a leadership decision.
It's not just a team performance.
You, the woman or the man who leads the team, you need to help the team by asking them to prioritize to confirm it, and if they can't do it, then help them.
Focus on maximum three absolute priorities.
A few suggestions to get specific.
Actively decide what will deliberately not be done and say it out loud.
Limit the parallel initiatives per team member and review priorities, not just quarterly, but monthly, maybe even weekly, if that's helpful for your team.
Example, a leadership team defines only three delivery goals for one week.
The fourth one, albeit important, is explicitly parked, not being worked on this week, full stop.
Result, the productivity increases, not because more is done, but because there are fewer interruptions.
So suggestion number two, radically reduce priorities to maximum three.
And my third suggestion, hold honest, short result check-ins.
Bring the right people together and ask a few simple questions.
But don't ask, hey, how is it going?
That's wasting time.
Instead, I would suggest questions like, what have we delivered this week?
What worked well?
What slowed us down?
What did we learn this week?
What will we change next week?
Without fear, without blame, without excuses, but with a willingness to learn and grow.
Your team, when too busy, doesn't need more pressure.
It needs more clarity, more courage to decide, and less busy work.
And in my experience, leadership does not mean keeping everything running, keeping too many things running.
Leadership means making results possible, making the right results possible.
The ones that matter the most by empowering and supporting your team.
So that's what I suggest.
Maybe something, hopefully, something you find worth thinking about, worth testing, worth trying, worth doing.
And if you like this Lightwolf podcast today, then please do me a quick favor.
Grab your smartphone now and quickly click on the star ratings in whatever podcast streaming service you're using right now.
Please leave a short reference, which is always useful for me, to understand what works and what I can improve next time to deliver even better service to you, the leaders out there who help us create a well-led world.
By the way, if you too want to find concrete ways for your team, your country, your company, to not just be busy, but to deliver great results that make you proud, and you'd like to speak informally with myself or with one of our senior partners, please book an appointment and we look forward to being in touch to sparring.
Maybe the conversation gives you a tip that you can put into action right away.
I hope you enjoyed it.
I thank you for your time today, and I look forward to next time.