If workloads aren’t adjusted as needed, the company’s priorities are already compromised. Executive coach Angela Justice explores what happens when goals move forward without removing unnecessary work and what to do about it.
After the announcement, José was already doing the math.
The new corporate goals made sense, and nearly all of them touched his role. The calculation was unavoidable: Where was the time supposed to come from when he was still finishing work tied to last year’s priorities?
Nothing in the discussion had suggested that work would stop, which meant the extra effort would have to come from somewhere else.
How Execution Quietly Fractures
In theory, priorities are meant to guide attention. In practice, when nothing is explicitly deprioritized, attention follows a different logic: what feels safest, what reduces immediate risk and what avoids creating friction.
This isn’t because people are ignoring direction. It’s because new goals are often introduced without addressing what happens to the work already in motion. In the absence of an explicit stop, most people assume they remain responsible for what they’ve been doing and that the new goals are now layered on top.
The result is predictable. Teams get busier. Calendars fill. Meetings proliferate. Work continues, but progress on the new goals is slower and increasingly dependent on extra effort and quiet heroics.
Over time, execution doesn’t collapse. It strains. And when timelines slip or results fall short, the explanation often lands on commitment or discipline.
That diagnosis misses the point.
Where the Breakdown Actually Occurs
As corporate goals move through functions, teams and individual roles, they collide with something real: already committed resources, work in flight, dependencies and human limits.
This is where leadership matters most. When leaders don’t make subtraction explicit, they’re not enabling focus. They’re forcing individuals to reconcile impossible tradeoffs on their own.
Most people respond in good faith. They try to make it work. They absorb the ambiguity. They don’t raise their hand and challenge the premise, especially in a volatile industry where visibility and perceived value matter, and job security is a real risk.
Alignment, in these moments, becomes performative. Everyone nods. Everyone agrees. And the real tradeoffs go unnamed.
The Work That Never Gets Reconsidered
In biopharma, work rarely disappears on its own.
Systems rolled out last year still require maintenance, training and troubleshooting. Cross-functional review processes that no one formally owns but everyone depends on continue. Data pipelines that technically work but require steady human intervention to keep them from breaking under pressure are kept around.
Over time, this background effort consumes the very capacity new goals were meant to draw from. Timelines stretch. Dependencies slip. Execution slows. And once progress lags, leaders look for performance problems instead of capacity problems.
The failure isn’t lack of effort. It’s subtraction that never happened.
Why Saying No Is So Hard Right Now
For individuals who are not part of the leadership team, this is where the tension sharpens. Saying no to work that should have been removed feels riskier than saying yes, especially when the job market is tight and layoffs feel arbitrary. No one wants to give anyone a reason to question their value. So, they keep going. They overcarry and wait for relief that never comes.
This response isn’t complacency. It’s rational self-preservation.
But it has a cost. Roles lose shape. Accountability blurs. And the people who reliably absorb ambiguity become invisible liabilities—overloaded and under-recognized but quietly critical to keeping things from breaking.
What Leadership Actually Owes
If you’re leading a team or function, subtraction is not optional work. It is the work. Your people should not have to guess what matters less now. They should not have to quietly drop work and hope no one notices. They should not be left reconciling tradeoffs you refused to make visible.
Before company priorities are translated into team- and individual-level goals, leaders need to be explicit about which former priorities, work or commitments are stopping and ensure that the same interrogation continues as goals move through each level of the organization.
In practice, that means asking teams what is actively consuming time and attention right now, not just what appears on a roadmap. It means listening for initiatives that were once important but never formally closed. And it means clearly stating when something is being deprioritized, even when that work is valuable, well designed or personally meaningful.
By making those calls, some work will continue. Some will slow. Some will stop. You’ll prevent new priorities from being built on silent overextension.
Before the Work Redistributes Itself
If you’re not leading a team or function, you may not shape the company’s goals, but you are a critical part of how they’re achieved. Because of that, your most useful contribution isn’t enthusiasm or ambition. It’s accuracy.
The moment when corporate priorities are translated into individual goals is one of the few opportunities to make existing work visible before effort reallocates itself. Ask yourself:
- What am I actively working on right now?
- What carried over from last year?
- What ongoing responsibilities take up my time even if they aren’t tied to a company goal?
Naming that work to yourself and then communicating it to your manager isn’t resistance. It’s how tradeoffs become visible early, before new expectations are layered onto old ones by default.
By sharing the day-to-day work you do, you help your manager see how effort is actually distributed so they don’t assume there’s more capacity than there really is. They can help ensure that instead of burning out, you move forward with focused execution. Your effort will redistribute deliberately, not by default.
What Individuals Can Do When the Load Doesn’t Change
Although most leaders don’t want teams stretched thin or burned out, it’s possible nothing will come off your workload when goals roll out. If that happens, don’t wait until overload forces a breaking point to speak up. Resurface reality as soon as possible by informing your manager how the new expectations are interacting with what’s already in motion.
The aim isn’t to challenge priorities or opt out of execution. It’s to bring awareness to your situation and find the best way forward. Frame the conversation around what’s proving harder, slower or more resource-intensive than planned. This approach helps leaders who aren’t involved in day-to-day work recalibrate assumptions and adjust expectations before pressure forces reactive decisions.
When that picture is shared early, leaders can make informed calls so you don’t end up overextending yourself, delaying progress or carrying risk no one else can see.
When Nothing Stops, Everything Gets Riskier
When priorities move forward without explicit tradeoffs at each level, work keeps moving, but not everything moves in the same direction. Ambiguity occurs and misalignment becomes inevitable. And once pressure hits, progress becomes harder to achieve. Risk compounds—not just delivery risk, but credibility risk, talent risk and decision risk.
Remember: Subtraction isn’t weakness. It’s focus. And focus is what allows execution to hold when conditions change. If you’re in leadership, you control what gets stopped. And if you’re not, your responsibility is different but still critical: Make visible what you’re carrying early enough for tradeoffs to happen.
That’s what gives new goals a real chance to succeed without burning people out.
