High-performing employees are valued by organizational leaders for good reason. They’re reliable, adaptable, and willing to step in when something needs to get done. When responsibilities are unclear or processes break down, they figure it out. When a team is stretched thin, they pick up the slack. And because they consistently deliver, leaders learn that they can give them more.
However, Lauren Cohen, JD, founder of Cohen Leadership Group, a boutique leadership advisory firm that helps fast-growing companies build scalable leadership systems, says herein lies a paradox: These capable employees can also mask organizational weaknesses. As the most reliable people take on more and more work, they allow companies to keep operating despite underdeveloped leadership systems. What initially looks like an individual strength can therefore become an organizational liability and, over time, a recipe for burnout. I spoke to Cohen about the idea.
JW: Why do the most capable people often end up carrying the burden of organizational dysfunction?
LC: Because they can, and they do, and people continue to put that burden on their shoulders.
My practice used to be focused entirely on individuals who came to me for executive coaching. Something I learned very quickly was that you can help one person, but when they’re trying to solve problems created by the system they’re working in—and then they return to that same system—your impact is pretty limited.
A lot of times, capable people take on the burden of insufficient or underdeveloped leadership systems. And those capable people can actually mask underdeveloped systems for a long time. The cracks go unnoticed because people just keep piling that work onto their own shoulders.
Being capable is valuable for a long time in your career, but as you elevate into leadership, it becomes much more about building capacity around you. At some point, capability can become a liability—not only because that person becomes overloaded and burned out, but because the system never develops in a way that supports organizational health.
JW: And organizations themselves can reinforce that dynamic. What needs to change?
LC: Competence is often a hiding place for organizational dysfunction. We leave it to the individual to solve burnout, but then they come back into the exact same working environment and the same system, which just reinforces it.
I don’t think this is an HR problem. I think it’s a leadership problem. Organizations need to ask: How are we overburdening capable people? How are our leadership systems underdeveloped in ways that disproportionately impact those people?
I talk a lot about “leadership debt,” which is basically the gap between a growing organization and the leadership systems that exist to support that growth. When an organization is small, you can mask some of that for quite a while. But as it grows and becomes increasingly complex, individuals become more and more burdened if the system doesn’t develop along with it.
The incentives matter, too. If you say you care about reducing burnout, but your compensation, performance reviews, and feedback celebrate the person who works 24/7 and never takes a vacation, those things are misaligned. We need to think about leadership systems as a critical business system, not an HR program.
JW: What if you’re the burned-out employee inside one of these organizations and don’t have much power to change the system?
LC: I think about it in terms of three things: What can you control? What can you let go of? And what can you influence?
Starting with yourself is important because it helps you regain a sense of personal control. But there’s also that bucket of influence, which I think we sometimes forget about. We often have more influence than we think we do.
Think about where you sit in the organization, what relationships you have, and what conversations you might start. Maybe it’s with a peer. Maybe it’s with your leader. Maybe that inspires someone to have another conversation with a leader at a higher level who has more control over the system. I always urge people to lean into that bucket of “What can I influence?” because there’s typically more there than we tend to think.
JW: Can an employee actually recover from burnout while remaining in the system that produced it?
LC: Maybe. I think maybe. But if the system itself is contributing to the burnout, something about the system—or your relationship to it—ultimately has to change. If you’re going to stay in a system that is producing burnout, you have to define what healthy looks like for you in relation to your work and what unhealthy looks like, and then set some very clear boundaries and parameters around that.
Where people get tripped up is that they set the boundary, but they’re not willing to enforce it. When you’re in a system that is used to you showing up a certain way, people typically don’t react very well when you set a new boundary.
The easy part is actually setting the boundary. The harder part is reinforcing it as people keep asking more and more of you while they learn your new habits. And in some organizations that are truly toxic, that boundary may not be acceptable. You have to be willing to navigate that and decide if and when you’re going to hold those boundaries firmly.
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Years ago, when I was the director of a strategic design MBA program, I would invite business leaders to join our graduate students over dinner and conversation. Inevitably, there was a moment in the recounting of their origin story when these successful leaders would reference a significant crossroads that required some major decision making. But they didn’t reference rationale and logic. Instead, they mused that “something told me not to do the deal” or “something told me to work with Lucy instead of Jim, even though Lucy didn’t have as impressive a pedigree.”
We tend to call that something instinct. I like to encapsulate those critical intuitive moments as the times when our sentient intelligence rises to the fore. We are all equipped with sentient intelligence. It’s our superpower. I think of sentient intelligence as a collection of sensory and emotional navigational tools that we humans use to make sense of the world around us. It helps us to extract meaning from signals in our environments by way of our physical senses (e.g., sight, sound and touch) and through our emotional console. We are equipped with bodily sensations, emotional cues and the brain’s default mode network to sit in awe, discern meaning, pause, and ask bold follow up questions. The thing is, sentient intelligence increasingly matters in our world. While AI can synthesize and augment the ideas we feed it, AI cannot detect or discern the problems that our sensemaking signals pick up. Machines may be able to execute, but subtle and tacit discernment is best left to humans.
A toolkit
Interestingly these successful leaders didn’t learn about the importance of tapping into that sentient intelligence in business school, law school or medical school. Yet, it’s a toolkit to which we can all avail for ourselves. If you listen closely to the decision making process of successful leaders — whether they are start-up leaders or embedded in the ranks of corporate organizations — sentient intelligence is a consistent theme.
This realization came into clear view for me during a recent conversation with Vikram Taneja, the Head of AT&T’s corporate ventures. Vikram is responsible for making big bets on AT&T’s investments in the next best tech entrepreneurship partnerships. What’s interesting is that in many ways, his due diligence is as much about discerning a founder’s ability to sit with ambiguity as it is about the founder’s technological savvy.
Most people think that AI adoption is mainly an infrastructure challenge, a problem that can be solved by shuffling around work processes. But the truth is that our agentic future hinges on our human capacity to activate our sentient intelligence before and after our use of AI tools. I call this the human-AI-human sandwich.
When I asked Vikram what makes great founders stand out he emphasized that they need to have “strong willed vision while also holding imprecise information … extremely well”. That’s a capability that elevates the rigor of ambiguity. Ambiguity and uncertainty aren’t going anywhere. So the more comfortable we can get with liminal spaces the better. It appears that successful start up leaders in today’s AI environments have not only developed that visceral ability; they can also translate it into designing guardrails around what an agent is authorized to do on a human’s behalf.
For example, Vikram told me, “that moment when I ordered a pizza, but I got a brownie” is about “orchestration.” By orchestration, Vikram is referring to the workflow management, control planes, policy and identity management between AI agents and the physical world. His comment fundamentally points out the distinctive ability of a technologist to design in elements of trust, identity and judgement calls that machines alone cannot make.
The rigor of ambiguity
So let’s widen the lens a bit. Maybe you’re not an inventor-founder partnering with a corporate tech giant to get your startup off the ground. Maybe you’re a manager, an assistant, a director, or someone who doesn’t know an AI agent from a ticket agent. How does this point about the rigor of ambiguity relate to you? Here are three ways that developing our sentient intelligence bridges the gap between what’s obvious and what’s outstanding:
- The business critical fork in the road: Sentient intelligence is a critical strategy skill that helps you to stand out because it helps you to deploy AI with authority — beyond simply adopting it.
- Discernment guardrails: Sentient intelligence builds trust beyond the spreadsheet data points. Without it, AI driven products and services fall flat and don’t resonate with customers. Being able to read the room is a hardcore soft skill.
- Wisdom trumps efficiency: While efficiency gets us short term gains, if we trust automation too much, then we miss subtleties. Wisdom comes with pausing and deciding what to hand off and what to hold on to. In the long term, building wisdom through sentient intelligence gives us the best gains.
Sentient intelligence is a “yes-and” modality: it can happen quickly and slow down time; it is based on visible cues and dormant ones, and it is sparked internally as well as among a collective. Increasingly, the quality of our human judgement interfaced with AI partnership will deliver the strongest business case.
You will do yourself and your team a world of good by pausing and listening to that “something told me” — and share about it!
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