Scarcity

What happens when leaders fail to pause

I read Scarcity by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir over the holiday break. While not a traditional leadership book, the ideas shared in this book, really helped me understand what happens when I, or other leaders, continue to work under sustained pressure and without taking a pause. It’s about what happens to decision-making, self-control, and perspective when time, energy and/or attention are in short supply in our leadership roles.

The core idea in this book is how bandwidth is affected when we are not balanced and don’t take the time to pause and recharge. It's about how the mental capacity we rely on to plan, reason, prioritize, interact with people, and exercise judgment. When bandwidth is constrained, people focus on what’s immediately in front of them and lose the broader context they actually need to make good decisions. This isn’t a discipline issue, a maturity issue, or a capability gap. It’s a predictable cognitive response to pressure.

This idea connects directly to my recent post about the cost of skipping the pause. When leaders defer recovery and take time to balance their physical, mental, social, or emotional needs, they aren’t just getting tired. They’re reducing their available bandwidth.

And we’ve all experienced how that affects our leadership impact. We feel busy but less effective. We make decisions to clear the backlog with less intentionality. Listening takes more effort. More work starts to funnel upward, not because the team isn’t capable, but because delegation and coaching feel slower than execution.

This is also where situational leadership begins to diminish. Leaders with reduced bandwidth are more likely to micromanage experienced team members or, at the same time, over-empower newer ones before they’re ready. In both cases, the issue isn’t intent or knowledge; it's a lack of discernment because discernment requires bandwidth.

One of the most useful takeaways from Scarcity is that this pattern doesn’t resolve itself by trying harder. In fact, added pressure often makes it worse. What helps is creating space, a strategic pause to recharge and rebalance. This pause isn’t a break; it’s a way to restore the cognitive capacity that powers effective and impactful leadership.

This reframes balance in a more practical way. Without balance, even experienced, well-intentioned leaders start to operate below their capabilities.

Leadership comes with pressure; that’s part of the role. But sustained pressure without pause doesn’t just exhaust leaders. It quietly undermines the bandwidth that supercharges their impact.