Why Your Team’s Capacity Is Lower Than It Used to Be

Lately, I’ve been hearing a version of the same sentence from senior leaders:

“I don’t recognize myself. I used to have more energy for this.”

Maria, a founder CEO I coach, recently told me exactly that.

Her business wasn’t failing.

Her team wasn’t disengaged. She wasn’t incompetent.

Still, she was exhausted.

When we looked closer, nothing catastrophic had happened, but she was carrying a lot:

Aging parents. Political volatility affecting her industry. Investor pressure. Hard personnel decisions. Shifts in immigration policy impacting her clients. A relentless news cycle.

Individually, each was manageable.

Together, they were eroding her cognitive and emotional bandwidth. She interpreted that erosion as a motivation problem — it wasn’t.

And that’s happening across organizations, maybe more than you think.

Ask yourself: What invisible stressors are present on my team that we’re not naming? Have I assumed our capacity is the same as it was 12–18 months ago?

Capacity Is Not Just Time

In a prior article I wrote for Harvard Business Review about overlapping personal and professional setbacks, I described what happens when strain compounds.

What I’m seeing now is that the compounding effect isn’t just individual. It’s systemic.

Capacity isn’t just time.

It’s cognitive clarity. Emotional steadiness. Decision-making bandwidth.

That bandwidth is being consumed by:

• Ambient stress from political and economic volatility

• Caregiving responsibilities

• Market instability

• Role ambiguity

• Constant AI headlines

• Low-level fear about relevance and security

If you’re seeing this in your team, it isn’t because they’re weaker than they used to be.

They’re just carrying more than they used to.

As Maria was navigating all these external pressures, she was also evaluating her enthusiasm for three possible new directions for her business:

Corporate leasing → low enthusiasm AI voice agent → moderate Corporate housing aggregator → 4.5–5 out of 5

That rating difference mattered.

The difference wasn’t strategy. It was cognitive load.

It proved she wasn’t incapable of vision, she was just overwhelmed.

When we reduced the load, her clarity returned.

Not with a motivational speech or self-criticism, but with strategic capacity recovery.

For two weeks, she stopped consuming news and social media. She reconfigured her office to create a physical reset. She blocked “CEO days” for strategic thinking. She worked from cafes and conference rooms to interrupt mental patterns. She stepped away from tactical churn long enough to think.

When cognitive load decreased, strategic thinking increased.

That’s not magic.

It’s what happens when leaders protect their own capacity.

Ask yourself: Where are you fragmenting your attention, or your team’s, unnecessarily? What could you stop doing — not to lower standards, but to restore focus?

And it isn’t just founders. Another client recently moved into a new home. On paper, everything was positive.

New neighborhood. Fresh start. Good energy.

But underneath that:

• A roof leak he had to tarp before rain.

• A spouse recovering from illness.

• AI disruption headlines.

• A thinner-than-usual sales pipeline.

• Private equity market uncertainty.

• Doomscrolling.

He told me he was only getting 3–4 focused hours of work done per day.

Objectively, nothing was “wrong.”

But everything required attention.

And attention is finite.

Again, the intervention wasn’t about accountability.

It was about load reduction.

He deleted LinkedIn from his phone for two weeks. Limited doomscrolling. Focused on building AI fluency intentionally instead of reactively. Prioritized sleep and exercise. Stabilized his home environment.

Performance didn’t return because he “tried harder.” It returned because the invisible weight decreased.

Why Teams Feel Slower

This isn’t just an individual issue.

Teams today are operating under chronic ambiguity. Hybrid friction. Reorg fatigue. Quiet layoffs. AI uncertainty. Financial pressure. Personal strain outside of work.

And leaders keep asking:

Why aren’t we moving faster? Why does everything take longer? Why does decision-making feel slower?

It’s because baseline capacity has shifted.

The most dangerous leadership error right now is confusing reduced capacity with reduced commitment.

When leaders assume capacity is constant, they design for overload.

When they acknowledge capacity has shifted, they design for focus.

Ask yourself: Am I responding to slower execution with pressure — or with design?  What would happen if we reduced noise before increasing expectations?

If performance feels off, consider three dimensions:

1. Ambient Load — What stressors are present that no one is talking about?

2. Cognitive Fragmentation — How often are people interrupted, context-switching, or reacting instead of thinking?

3. Emotional Depletion — What invisible strain is draining forward energy?

In Maria’s case:

News cycle = ambient load Daily reactivity = scattered attention

Investor pressure + personnel decisions = emotional depletion

Nothing was broken.

But everything was heavier.

What Leaders Can Do (Strategically)

This is not about lowering standards.

It’s about reducing noise before demanding performance.

You can:

• Kill zombie projects that dilute focus

• Simplify metrics

• Clarify what truly matters this quarter

• Create protected thinking space

• Signal explicitly what can wait

• Design offsites around priorities, not updates

When everything is urgent, capacity collapses.

When focus sharpens, energy returns.

Performance used to come from intensity, now it comes from intentionality.

Your team may not need more accountability.

They may need less invisible weight.