Executive Summary (TL;DR)
If your team is drowning in work, here are two ways to get them back on track.
Step 1: Start with the “Stop Doing” List
Before you’re allowed to add anything else to their plate, you have to come up with things they’re going to stop doing immediately. You want to ask, “What can we stop doing that won’t hurt us?”
Step 2: 80/20 Audit
If 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort, the rest is just busywork. Find that 20% that’s really driving momentum and impact and postpone the rest.
Are you noticing that your team seems to be drowning in work? If your team feels like they are sprinting just to stay in place, you’re not dealing with a performance problem. You’re dealing with a leadership opportunity.
Most overwhelmed teams are not unmotivated or unfocused. They are simply carrying too much. Too many priorities, too many meetings, too many handoffs, too many “quick asks” that weren’t really quick.
And during change, this gets amplified. Even high performers start to feel scattered, fatigued, and unable to tell what actually matters. When your team is drowning in work, your job is NOT to push harder. Your job is to reframe the work so your team can breathe again and focus on impact.
Here are two simple but powerful leadership tools that every Change Leader could use (or coach others to use!).
Step 1: Start with the “Stop Doing” List
If your team is underwater, the answer is not adding more swim strokes. It’s lightening the load.
Before you ask anyone to do ONE more thing, you need to decide what they will no longer do (or temporarily STOP doing). This is the part leaders skip, and it is exactly why burnout shows up during organizational transformation.
Ask your team: “What can we stop doing (even for a little while) that will not hurt us?”
Then push DEEPER:
- What reporting does no one read?
- What meetings create zero value?
- What processes are leftover artifacts from an older system?
- What tasks could be paused without consequence?
- What approval steps are busywork?
- What goals are competing instead of aligning?
This conversation alone can create huge relief. Stopping work is not failure. It is leadership clarity.
You are saying: I see the load. I value your capacity. I’m willing to remove things so you can focus on what matters.
Change Management Teams
Change Management teams especially need this. They often carry hidden emotional and cognitive labor that no one accounts for:
- Coaching
- Alignment Conversations
- Resistance Decoding
- Translation
- Rework
Their “real job” is only a fraction of the work they hold. A strong “Stop Doing” list clears the clutter so their expertise can actually breathe.
Step 2: Run an 80/20 Audit
If 80 percent of results come from 20 percent of effort, then overwhelmed teams are drowning in the wrong eighty.
The 80/20 Audit is simple:
- Identify the 20% of work creating real momentum, clarity, or progress
- Protect it
- Postpone, pause, or deprioritize everything else
Ask your team: “If we could only accomplish three things this quarter, which ones would change the game?”
And ask again, more directly: “What would happen if we didn’t finish the rest?”
You will be surprised how much work feels important but is not actually moving anything forward. And in change environments, the noise is constant: updates, decks, templates, documentation, firefighting, meeting prep, stakeholder check-ins, and endless “can you take a quick look at this.”
The 80/20 Audit gives you a way to see the signal through the noise. It creates permission to focus on impact, not activity.
And your team feels the difference immediately. Overwhelm drops. Alignment rises. Work becomes purposeful again. People feel competent again. The path becomes clear again.
Why This Matters for Leaders Managing Change
Change creates extra work before it creates ease. This is a truth most leaders forget. Your team is not drowning because they lack discipline. They are drowning because the system keeps handing them bricks.
Strong change leaders protect their teams by:
- Removing work, not just assigning
- Choosing clarity over urgency
- Prioritizing impact over volume
- Giving explicit permission to pause low-value tasks
- Naming the real weight their team is carrying
- Designing capacity with the human side in mind
When you manage a team of Change Managers, this becomes even more important. They hold the emotional load of an entire organization’s uncertainty. They absorb resistance. They translate chaos. They stabilize leaders who are inconsistent.
If they are drowning, everyone downstream will drown too. Capacity is a leadership responsibility.
A Reframe for Impact
When a team is overwhelmed, their world shrinks.
- They see tasks, not outcomes
- They react, instead of shaping
- They lose visibility of the bigger picture
Your role as a leader is to widen their perspective again.
- A “Stop Doing” list grounds them.
- An 80/20 Audit focuses them.
- And together, these tools pull a drowning team back to the surface.
Clarity replaces noise. Purpose replaces panic. And the team can finally do the work that truly matters.
Final Thoughts: Overwhelm Is Not a Sign of Weakness. It Is a Signal.
A drowning team is not failing. They are telling you something.
They are signaling that load, pace, and expectations need to be rebalanced. They are signaling that priorities need to be trimmed. They are signaling that leadership must step in and reframe the work.
When leaders respond with presence, clarity, and courage, the team rises again. When leaders don’t, the work collapses and the people collapse with it.
Two simple questions can change everything:
- What will we stop doing?
- What is the 20 percent that truly drives impact?
Ask them. Reframe the work. Help your people breathe again. And you will see your team do extraordinary things.
