Coming back after summer vacation always requires some adjustment. It can take a few days to recover your focus and settle into work again.

But I’m noticing something more enduring in the conversations I’m having with senior leaders. Work that once felt relatively straightforward now takes more effort. Focus is harder to sustain, decisions require more discussion, and alignment is harder to achieve. You’re working just as diligently, but progress feels slower and the results are less predictable.

Many leaders quietly assume that something has changed in them. Perhaps they are less focused or decisive than they used to be, getting older, or approaching burnout. When you have spent years being the person who delivers, questioning your own performance can feel more reasonable than questioning the conditions around you.

Those conditions have changed substantially. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 found that global employee engagement fell to 20 per cent in 2025, its lowest level since 2020.

Organizations often respond to disappointing engagement results by investing in more training for leaders and managers. Reinvention expert Dr. Nadya Zhexembayeva questions whether this diagnosis goes far enough. She argues that disengagement may be “a rational response to an impossible situation.” Many organizations are asking people to operate amid permanent volatility using roles, expectations and organizational models designed for greater stability.

The practices that helped most senior leaders succeed were developed when priorities held longer, roles were more stable and decisions had more predictable consequences. Today, decisions involve more interdependencies, stakeholders and variables that can change during implementation. Each action requires additional coordination, interpretation and adjustment.

The McKinsey State of Organizations 2026 report provides further evidence. Of more than 10,000 senior executives surveyed, 72 per cent believe their organizations are not fully prepared for what is coming. Two-thirds describe their organizations as overly complex and inefficient, while familiar responses such as restructuring, cost-cutting and flattening hierarchies are producing diminishing returns.

For leaders in publicly accountable and mission-driven organizations, limited resources add another layer. You may be balancing a growing mandate against fixed funding, answering to a board and multiple stakeholder groups, and making decisions that affect people and communities without the information or authority you would ideally want. Progress often depends on people and organizations you do not directly control.

It is no wonder that the same results take more effort.

Increasing your personal effort may work temporarily, but it does not address the conditions making the work harder. Stepping back can help you see where the friction originates, where your effort could produce better results, and where the organization needs to respond.

Here are three shifts to help you do that. Take a sheet of paper, turn it sideways and create three columns so you can see your answers together.

1. Find where the work has become harder

Ask yourself: Where am I investing considerably more effort than I used to, without seeing a comparable improvement in results?

Identify something that used to move relatively easily and now requires much more attention. It could be reaching a decision, gaining agreement on a priority, moving work across departments or following through once a direction has been set.

Then examine what has changed. Are more people involved? Have their interests become harder to reconcile? Is important information arriving later? Are people reluctant to act without greater certainty or approval? Does the issue now cross boundaries your existing structures were not designed to manage?

2. Identify what is creating the friction

Ask yourself: What conditions are making this work require so much intervention from me?

A decision may keep returning to you because authority at the next level is unclear. Alignment may take longer because priorities have accumulated without explicit trade-offs. A cross-functional issue may depend on goodwill because no reliable process exists for resolving it. A senior team may revisit decisions because people do not share the same understanding of what has changed or why the chosen response makes sense.

Some challenges call for a change in your own leadership. Others expose weaknesses in how the organization makes decisions, shares information or coordinates action.

3. Change one condition affecting the work

Ask yourself: What could I change about how this work is structured, decided or coordinated?

You might clarify who has authority to make a decision and what information they need. You might stop or defer a priority so people can focus on what matters most. You might create a reliable way for front-line information to influence executive decisions. You might name an unsustainable trade-off with your board or funder rather than continuing to manage its consequences internally.

Circle one condition and decide what you will do about it within the next 24 hours. The conditions around you will continue to change. Seeing where they create friction allows you to adapt how the work gets done, so greater effort does not become the permanent price of progress.

Getting an accurate view of your own situation is difficult from inside it. My Executive Coaching gives senior leaders a steady outside perspective on the decisions, pressures and organizational patterns in front of them. If that would be useful, you can read more about how it works here.