In our first Ask the Expert session of 2026, I sat down with Dr. Liane Davey, Co-founder and Principal at 3Coze and our official team coaching content partner, to unpack why so many leaders feel stuck in constant firefighting. We talked about Liane’s upcoming book Thoughtload: Manage the Madness and Free Your Team to Do Great Work. What a timely conversation! Here are three key takeaways for any leader struggling to stay afloat.
1. Firefighting is Causing Fawning: 45% of leaders cited constant firefighting as the top challenge in The Roundtable Report on High Potential Leaders. When every request is treated as urgent, teams stay in a heightened state of alert that creates real cognitive and emotional strain. We’ve all heard of the fight, flight and freeze response to stressors, but what’s showing up more often these days is fawning: saying yes by default, taking on more than is realistic, and avoiding capacity conversations out of fear of consequences. Fawning keeps leaders reactive, reinforces unclear priorities, and spreads overwhelm across teams.
One way to break out of the fawning response is to recalibrate priorities regularly and diminish urgency, explicitly.
2. Clarify your quest: When leaders don’t prioritize clearly, teams get lost in the day-to-day activities by default. Work gets done and calendars stay full, but not all outputs lead to meaningful results. Leaders need to define the main quest: the outcome the organization most needs from your team right now. Then, name the side quests that may matter, but shouldn’t dominate attention. This means leaders need to get crystal clear on the outcomes they’re seeing and the outputs and activities that will get them there. When teams understand which outputs actually drive results, unnecessary work drops away and the overall thought load comes down.
3. Try a Two-Hour Triage: Interruptions don’t just add more tasks. They add cognitive and emotional weight, pulling us back into reactive mode. Without protected focus time, teams stay trapped in firefighting. Two uninterrupted hours allow leaders and teams to think, prioritize, and make progress on what matters. Try this: encourage your team to silence their notifications for two-hour blocks of time in the morning and afternoon and role model it yourself. Attention isn’t a personal productivity issue, it’s a leadership decision.
Leading under pressure isn’t about taking on more or moving faster. It’s about creating clarity, managing attention, and reducing unnecessary thought load for yourself and for the people you lead. Thank you to Liane for sharing so many golden nuggets in this one-hour session. Check out more of her work by visiting her website here and be sure to pre-order a copy of her new book Thoughtload launching later this year.
3 Ways to Keep the Conversation Going
- Watch the full replay here and reflect on how thought load shows up on your team.
- Download The Roundtable 2026 Report on High Potential Leaders to learn how clarity, focus, and energy support sustainable performance.
- Build your own leadership capacity in 2026: Registration is now open for our Spring The Roundtable for Leaders program. If you’re interested in navigating increased scope, building capability and expanding the impact of your team, book a meeting with Colleen to learn more.
