How to Keep Momentum When Your Team Is Over-Taxed and Under-Resourced
There’s a quiet tension leaders feel when the calendar is full, the pressure is high, and the bandwidth just isn’t there. I see it all the time with clients—senior teams doing important, often mission-driven work, who are fully aware of what needs to change but are too stretched to take it on right now.
I get it. Truly. There are moments when even the best-intentioned improvement efforts feel like one more thing—and yet, the need for progress doesn’t stop just because we’re busy. In fact, those are often the very moments when leadership matters most.
Whether it’s improving processes that frustrate your team, slow down results, and cause mistakes—or developing the talent on your team so they can do more, better, faster—or even following through on that amazing offsite that left everyone energized until "real life" pulled you back into old habits—these are the moments your teams need you.
So what do you do when you know the work is important, but the timing feels impossible?
You get creative by looking beyond your go-to “brain”. What do I mean by that? I mean tap into the intelligence that lives in your mind, sure, but also see what your heart, hands and health intelligence centers can contribute. That’s what we call Whole Human Leadership – and if you’re not using all four leadership “brains”, then you’re likely missing out on a solution.
Because staying in motion—especially when your team is stretched—requires more than intellect. It requires drawing on everything you’ve got: your head for strategy, your heart for intuition and emotional intelligence, your hands for action, and your health for resilience and connection to purpose.
I saw one leader do this brilliantly:
Instead of stopping completely, she considered how she might adjust.
Here are a few tactics she discovered when she started using her full range of human intelligence:
-
Taking smaller, more manageable steps. Why this appealed to her was it would allow her to keep forward movement and help her team see she wasn’t abandoning something that was important to them. Baby steps are still steps.
-
Extending the work over a longer period, or tackle one piece at a time. For example, start with one function, one leader, or one initiative. Sequence what matters most.
-
She looked at tasks or meetings that could be deferred or done by AI tools to make space for something more valuable. She realized that making room for what matters most requires letting go of what matters less—at least for now.
Leading this way requires intention and discernment. It means asking not only, "What can we accomplish with the resources we have?" but also, "What can we sustain?" It means noticing when your team is stretched thin—and still finding ways to care about what matters to them, your shared mission and curate the culture you’re building together.
Whole Human Fitness Tips for Leaders:
-
Break down a large initiative into one small, doable step and commit to it this week.
-
Check in with your team’s energy levels—how are they feeling, not just doing?
-
Choose one simple action to embed growth into your team’s regular routines.
-
Pause to reconnect the team to purpose—why this work matters now, even if it’s moving slower.
The truth is, momentum doesn’t always look like speed. Sometimes it looks like intentional sequencing. Sometimes it looks like protecting capacity. Sometimes it’s simply keeping the conversation alive—even if the pace is slower than you hoped.
So if you’re in a moment where the timing doesn’t feel right and what you originally hoped to do doesn’t seem possible, ask yourself: what version of progress is possible right now? What can you resize, stretch and stagger, or rebalance to keep moving in a way that honors both your people and your priorities?
Because leadership isn’t about doing everything at once. More often, it’s about staying connected to the work—and to each other—even when it needs to unfold more slowly.
And that, too, is momentum.