Maggie Anderson Phelps: When leading through uncertainty, build in some slack

We’re at a tipping point with workload. I talk daily with people who are burned out, exhausted or ready to walk away.

Leadership sees it. And feels it. A 2025 study by International SOS found stress and burnout top the list of issues most likely to impact people and businesses in the year ahead.

At every level, people are working at overcapacity. They’re being asked to do more with less, often filling gaps from layoffs and reorganizations, fielding surprises in the market and managing the emotions that uncertainty brings. Like the rivers in our recent storms, there comes a time when the deluge becomes too much and begins to spill over with a flood of unmet needs.

Business leaders are being whisked downriver at increasing speed. Time is scarce, and the environment is unstable. And the stakes are high, because we know the cost of burnout is disengagement and attrition.

This is a test of resilience.

Ann Masten, a developmental psychologist and Regents professor at the University of Minnesota, offers a compelling description of resilience. She calls it “ordinary magic,” meaning resilience is not rare or extraordinary but rather arises from common adaptive systems—like supportive relationships, problem-solving skills and self-regulation—that most people can develop.

This view of resilience is valuable. It highlights how accessible and scalable resilience can be, which is exactly what we need in workplace systems to counterbalance the workload we’re facing.

Three years ago, I was feeling the effects of this myself. In a household of four with two working parents, a toddler, a baby and a business, we had dreams of another child and of living in a different way—to be more present and connected to each other and our community. But much of the time, it felt like we were drowning, fitting family life into the cracks of our work lives.

So, as many of us business problem-solvers do, we cracked open an Excel spreadsheet. We estimated the time we spent each week doing all the things we do, including sleep, and compared it to what we wanted to spend. After constructive back-and-forth to keep the numbers honest, we realized we were operating at 120% capacity. And we wanted to be doing even more.

Our sense of being overwhelmed wasn’t imagined. It was staring back at us on our spreadsheet. We expected more of ourselves than was realistically possible.

We also realized our estimates did nothing to account for the unexpected things that pop up daily.

So we created another column, and we called it “realistic.” We stayed up talking for hours into the night about the tradeoffs we would be willing to make to live a more balanced life.

The outcome: We painstakingly stepped away from things, some of them things we loved. We made space, which we called “slack,” inspired by Jamais Cascio’s BANI model (a framework for understanding a turbulent world). And despite our nature to fill unused space, we protected it—from ourselves and outside pressures. Three years later, it’s strikingly clear how much those decisions paid off. We saw a tangible ROI. What looked like divestment proved to be an investment.

And this is the challenge at hand for leaders and organizations. Examine capacity and priorities. Make the painful decisions you know are right. Look at the system in which you are operating and change it. Build in slack.

Building slack into your everyday isn’t indulgent or a “nice to have.” It’s strategic. Don’t be tempted to think your situation is the outlier that can’t afford this shift. You have agency. Always.•

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Phelps is a certified executive coach and founder of Anderson Phelps Consulting, specializing in leadership development that fosters authentic growth and systemic change.