Doing More with Less: Why Simply Working Harder Isn't the Answer
I recently asked the audience at a conference "How many of you feel busy or overwhelmed?" Almost every hand shot up. I wasn't surprised because I have felt it myself and I see it in every organisation I work with. Maybe you recognise the feeling: layoffs or restructures that mean tasks that used to belong to colleagues suddenly land on your plate. Or maybe you are in a new role and you realise you are doing two jobs instead of one. Even coaches and consultants like me know this pressure all too well.
It's easy for companies to suggest that we just "do more with less" and to deliver the same amount of work but with fewer people and tighter budgets. But that doesn't work in the long run. Sure, we can push harder and put in more hours. But long term it results in burnout, stress and a drop in the quality of our work.
When organisations push this "do more with less" mindset people inevitably get stretched too thin. Everyone is juggling multiple projects, working in several teams, and often attending three sprint planning meetings and four daily standups. There are so many meetings and all projects are priority one. When everyone is maxed out critical tasks like coaching, learning, and reflection get dropped.
But if simply pushing harder isn't the answer, what can we do instead?
AI Wont Solve the Problem
AI as the ultimate productivity booster seems like the obvious answer. And yes, it's true, it does make us more productive. But if we're all so much more productive there is no reason to keep so many of us around. Why not reduce the workforce, replace colleagues with AI and leave us in the exact same situation asking us to do more with even less?
I recently caught up with my friend Barbara in Europe, an HR executive at a major multi-national telco. Her team's daily life for the past two years has been making people redundant. Employee numbers at Barbara's company shrank dramatically from 17,000 to just 7,500. Some of it was due to economic pressure and telco services becoming a commodity but by far most of those employees were replaced by automation and AI. And the people who are left are stretched again.
This is not some distant future, this is happening right now. Increased productivity leads to fewer people being retained in our organisations and the same amount of work gets redistributed to even fewer people who are struggling to get everything done.
But here's the deeper problem with relying on AI as the solution: it doesn't address the fundamental issue of decision-making and autonomy. AI can help us work faster, but it can't help us work smarter. It can't make the tough calls about what to prioritise, when to say no, or how to balance competing demands. In fact, AI often creates more decisions that need human judgment - decisions about what to automate, how to implement changes, and how to handle edge cases. The more we rely on AI, the more we need clear decision-making processes and empowered teams to make those decisions effectively.
The Real Bottleneck – Decision-Making
How can we thrive in organisations that ask us to do more with less? How can we make this work?
I believe the real drag isn't just lack of resources. It's waiting for decisions. Waiting for approvals. Waiting for clarity on who's even allowed to decide. I see people stuck asking "What are the instructions?" "What are the requirements?" "Can I do ...?" "Should we..." "I'm still waiting for...".
I want to tell you about a recent experience with something that should have taken a week and took months instead. A team I was working with had built something really good. I came in and said, "Show me what you've got." They showed me their really good work and I said, "This is awesome! Why isn't it live?" And they said: "Well, it's missing a few things - this feature and that feature". I said: "Sure. But is it better than what people have now?" 'Oh yeah. A hundred percent.' So I asked: "Then why not just ship it?" "We're waiting for someone to tell us we can." Months of great work was stuck because everyone was waiting for a decision - and no one was quite sure who needed to make it.
Authoritarian Leadership
The obvious alternative is to have someone cut through this and just decide. Speed things up. Make a call. Just tell people what to do. But that's actually worse.
Evan Leybourn of the Business Agility Institute wrote a great piece on this titled "Authoritarian Leadership is on the Rise. And it's Failing.". His research, backed by data from over 2000 organisations, describes a growing trend of companies reacting to uncertainty and complexity by doubling down on top-down control.
Centralised decision-making feels fast and efficient in the moment, but over time it weakens organisations. If one person calls the shots and everyone else follows orders what's the point of discussion? The cost of authoritarian leadership is that it kills debate and dissent and strips away diversity of thought. It kills autonomy and suppresses innovation.
Evan describes the cost of authoritarian leadership by looking at what happened when Elon Musk took over Twitter (now X). Musk's impulsive, centralized decisions seemed effective at first but they ended up causing chaos, massive financial losses, and widespread employee burnout. The company has lost up to 72% of its value.
Authoritarian leadership looks like speed, but it is weak. It destroys the very agility it claims to value.
I learned this lesson the hard way early in my career. As a company founder I was determined to "fix" everything quickly. Sometimes, I made decisions rapidly, often without consulting the team (after all the decision seemed obvious). Other times I tried to decide collaboratively with the team but when there was silence I quickly filled the gaps with my solutions. At first, it seemed efficient - we were moving fast! But within weeks, I noticed my team becoming increasingly disengaged. They stopped bringing up problems, stopped suggesting improvements, and started waiting for my instructions on everything. We slowed down and the quality of our work began to suffer. It wasn't until I started stepping back, asking questions instead of giving answers and letting the team make decisions that we truly began to thrive. The lesson was clear: speed without autonomy is just an illusion of progress.
The research backs this up. A comprehensive study by Gagné and Deci (2005) in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that autonomy support leads to higher job satisfaction and better performance. Their work, which has been cited over 5,000 times, shows that when employees have more control over their work, they're more motivated and perform better. Similarly, a 2017 study by the University of Birmingham found that employees with higher levels of autonomy reported significantly higher job satisfaction and were more likely to stay with their organization. These findings align with what we see in practice: autonomy isn't just nice to have - it's a performance and productivity booster.
So if waiting and indecision are the problem, let's fix that. But we can't do this by swinging to dominance.
Autonomy: A Sustainable Alternative
The best lever we have is autonomy. If the goal is truly to do more with less, we need to break this bottleneck by distributing decision-making power. We need to push decisions to the edge, to the people closest to the work, closest to the customer and closest to reality.
And I'm talking about real autonomy: The power to decide. The freedom to act. The clarity to know what you're responsible for. Real autonomy is about freedom. It's about trust, i.e. believing that people will step up when given the chance. And it's about responsibility, i.e. owning outcomes, not just tasks.
Autonomy-decision loop
I know this can feel risky. Especially in times of uncertainty the instinct is often to tighten control, not loosen it. But time and again, we've seen that empowering people leads to better results. Not just in theory - in real teams, in real companies, facing real constraints.
The best way forward isn't to simply pile on more work or blindly trust AI. It's about empowering the right people, the ones closest to the work to make decisions. Autonomy helps teams move faster, increases engagement and improves outcomes. If we truly want to do more with less, giving teams real decision-making power is the smartest way forward.
Think about your own workplace for a moment: Where are decisions getting stuck? How many times have you or your team waited for approval when you already knew what to do? The path to doing more with less isn't about working harder or waiting for AI to save us. It's about having the freedom to make decisions and take action when it matters most.
What next?
I’d love to hear how you have increased autonomy for and within your teams. What concrete actions have you taken or have seen others take that have enabled autonomy? Leave your ideas in the comments!
In future articles, I'll share some practical ways to build autonomy into how we work. We'll look at things like developing resilience, recalibrating relationships and how self-selection gives teams the freedom to choose their work—and each other.
More articles in this series:
Article 2: From Learned Helplessness to Autonomous Action: Building Resilience in Teams (To be published)
Article 3: Fixing Workplace Relationships: Lack of Autonomy as a Relationship Issue (To be published)
Article 4: Autonomy in Action: Why Letting Teams Self-Select Leads to Better Outcomes (To be published)