“Do more with less.”
You've heard it. You've probably even said it.
This week I spoke with a leader who less than a year ago led a department of more than 40 people, including several managers. Today he can count his team on one hand. The kicker- the people who remain are expected to deliver what the larger team did.
I wish this were unusual.
It isn’t.
A friend of mine was hired as a director, a leader of leaders. The layer beneath him was eliminated. He still has the title, but in practice he’s back to running a frontline team. A backfill role was in the late stages until they eliminated it. He was told it isn't coming back this year...or next.
A fellow coach told me about a client of hers, a sales leader at a large tech company, whose next step was supposed to be managing managers. That level no longer exists. She no longer knows how she is supposed to grow.
Across the organizations and leaders I work with, the middle is being compressed. Senior leadership is still there. The frontline is still there. But the layer between them is getting thinner, leaving the leaders who remain to take on the people and responsibilities those layers once supported. And yet somehow targets keep rising, and expectations keep climbing.
Leaders are told to do more with less. To elevate their teams. To be thought leaders. To manage the change. All of that is the what. Almost no one is handed the how.
That part is left to the person with the least capacity to figure it out.
Nothing comes off their plate either. They’re still expected to grow their people, develop the next set of leaders, and build a stronger organization.
One leader put it plainly: I need to do something to elevate myself and my team. When do I fit that in?
How do you develop people one-on-one when twice as many of them report to you? How do you build bench strength when the bench is what got cut? How do you strengthen an organization when you can barely see the end of the week?
I don't think the answer is more effort. The leaders I talk to aren't short on effort. They're short on space.
There isn't a single fix, and some of this is outside their control. But a leader in the middle can’t afford to wait.
What they can change is where the how gets worked out. Right now it’s on one person's shoulders.
And it doesn't have to be.
That’s where I’ve seen team coaching make a difference. It helps with two things at once: figuring out how the work gets done, and growing the people doing it.
It gives a team space to work out how to deliver more together. What to stop, where the time goes, which work can be simplified or automated, and who owns what. The answers come from the people doing the work, not from another directive from above.
It also develops people while they do the work, together, on a regular rhythm, without stacking another series of one-on-ones onto a full calendar. One conversation with the whole team can create shared clarity and accountability that ten separate conversations can’t.
“Do more with less” isn't going away.
But having to figure it out alone just might.