Expert Insights
What do you think your people do when they’re overloaded? (Most leaders get this wrong.)
By Brandon Thornton, Chief RPM Consultant at Milestone Consulting Group
Brandon Thornton is the co-creator of RPM, the Resource Alignment Platform, and the Chief RPM Consultant at Milestone Consulting Group. He’s spent decades helping Fortune 100 organizations across manufacturing, healthcare, and other industries align their people to their most important work.
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I’ve spent years inside enterprise organizations helping leaders achieve their goals and untangle their resource management problems. One of the most uncomfortable conversations I have—still, regularly—is this: Do your people know which of their tasks matters most?
Here’s what I find. When I ask that question, most leaders will say, “Yes, our people know where to focus. We’ve communicated our priorities, we’ve had an all-hands meeting. They know.”
Do your people know which of their tasks matters most?
Unfortunately, they’re usually wrong.
I never have to dig in very far to uncover a serious disconnect between what leadership believes, and what’s actually happening.
While the people on the frontlines might understand conceptually what their organization’s top goals are, when it comes to the 42 tasks assigned to them, knowing where to start becomes a lot less clear.
This matters more than most leaders realize.
When priorities aren’t clearly communicated all the way down to the task level, the people doing the work are going to decide what to work on first. And the decisions they make likely won’t match what their leaders would prefer.
What the science actually says
There are some pretty clear things we humans tend to do when we’ve got a lot on our plate, particularly when we’re not sure where to start.
In 2020, a Harvard Business School study looked at exactly this scenario. Researchers analyzed years of data from a hospital emergency department, studying how physicians selected patients when their workloads got heavy.
There are some pretty clear things we humans tend to do when we’ve got a lot on our plate.
Here’s what they found: Under conditions of high workload, people consistently choose the easier tasks over the more difficult ones.
The researchers called this “Task Completion Bias.” Doctors, when pressed, would pick up the less severe cases first—the ones they could move through quickly—rather than the more complex cases that actually needed their attention most.
“When we are overwhelmed and busy,” said Maryam Kouchaki, one of the study’s co-authors, “we just go with easier tasks, and the difficult tasks tend to pile up.”
That’s a hospital. But I’ve watched the same dynamic play out in every enterprise I’ve ever worked with.
“When we are overwhelmed and busy, we just go with easier tasks, and the difficult tasks tend to pile up.”
Maryam Kouchaki, professor of management and organizations at Kellogg School of Management
Why this is a system problem, not a people problem
Let’s be clear about something. This dynamic happens everywhere—even with the smartest, most dedicated, most well-meaning people.
When leadership’s priorities aren’t being completed, it isn’t because people are being lazy or irresponsible. They’re doing exactly what humans do under cognitive pressure—they’re relieving stress by making progress, and the fastest way to feel like you’re making progress is to check things off.
The problem is that nobody is providing the tools and information to override this tendency.
When there’s no clear signal about what matters most, people fill that gap with their own judgment. And their judgment, under pressure, is almost always going to favor the task that can be finished over the task that most needs to be done.
The gap nobody talks about
Here’s what I see in most enterprise organizations. Leadership—the board, the executive team, the people setting strategy—does the work of determining priorities. They make hard calls about what matters most this year, which initiatives get resources, what the organization is actually trying to accomplish. That work is real, and in most companies I’ve worked with, it’s done reasonably well.
What doesn’t happen is the translation of those priorities all the way down to the people doing the work.
Leaders tend to assume this problem is solved. They communicated the strategy. They held the all-hands. They published the annual goals.
Somewhere between the boardroom and the project team, the signal gets lost.
The message moves through layers of management, gets filtered through competing departmental agendas, and arrives (if it arrives at all) as something vague enough that a project manager or individual contributor can’t actually act on it.
They know the company has priorities. They may even be able to name them. What they can’t tell you, on a given Tuesday afternoon when they have eight things on their plate, is which of those eight things most directly serves what leadership is counting on.
Leaders tend to assume this problem is solved.
They communicated the strategy. They held the all-hands. They published the annual goals. But communication isn’t the same as clarity, and clarity at the top isn’t the same as clarity at the level where work actually gets assigned.
The people closest to execution are often working from their best guess—informed by habit, by whoever asked most recently, by what seems most urgent—rather than from any reliable signal about what leadership actually needs done first.
That’s the gap.
And it’s where Task Completion Bias does its quiet damage. When there’s no clear priority signal reaching the people doing the work, the default isn’t strategic—it’s psychological. People do what overloaded people always do: they clear what they can clear, and the harder, more important work waits.
Most resource management systems don’t close that gap. Find one that does.
So what’s the solution here? How can you be sure your people know what work matters most?
The answer—especially if your organization is large—is you’re going to need some pretty sophisticated software, something that will connect with every single project management system you’re using throughout your enterprise and keep your priorities top of mind with every individual, organization-wide.
Years ago, this is exactly the challenge we set out to solve at Milestone. It led to the development of RPM, and it’s changed the way many Fortune 100 companies work.
If you’ve ever wished your people were better aligned with your priorities, if you’re looking for new ways to think about resource management, or if you’re curious about RPM, be sure to follow me on LinkedIn. I’ll be sharing more thoughts and tips for visionary leaders, and I’d love to connect with you anytime.
