By Leslie Rohonczy, IMC™, PCC
Executive Coach | Leadership Development Expert | Author | Speaker | ©2026 | www.leslierohonczy.com
A meeting ends five minutes early. Hallelujah for small miracles! We could use those five minutes to finally get back to that person who asked, “Which of these two assignments is the priority?” But do we? No... we open our inbox just for a second, and five minutes later, we’ve replied to a lunch invitation and read half an email chain we wish we’d never been copied on. And that priority question? It's still waiting.
Meanwhile, without an answer to the question, the team is pushing both assignments forward and doubling their efforts to cover the uncertainty we’ve left them with. What slipped off our radar is now stretching their capacity, and their workdays.
That’s called leadership debt: the accumulating cost of leadership work we leave unresolved. In this case, our team members are paying for our delayed decision with their time and attention.
As an executive coach working with senior leaders, I offer these five questions to help identify leadership debts and ideas for how to address them.
FIVE QUESTIONS TO KILL LEADERSHIP DEBT
1. What am I postponing that’s creating extra work for someone else?
Perhaps someone keeps chasing approval for a recommendation you’ve already decided to support. Close that loop. If you can’t make the final decision, clarify what can proceed: “Start the analysis, and hold the purchase until I confirm on Thursday.” Then check your reason for waiting. Do you need information that could change the decision, or are you hoping another spreadsheet will make the responsibility feel lighter for you?
2. What haven’t we clarified that keeps bringing this back to me?
Imagine your employee checks every decision with you. Before concluding they lack confidence, ask: “What makes it difficult for them to move ahead without checking with me?” Perhaps their authority is unclear, or your response to a previous decision made checking seem necessary. Use the conversation to agree on a specific decision they can own, including when they should involve you.
3. What might someone now be doing because of how I responded?
You said, “It needs more detail.” They could be adding twenty slides when you wanted a clearer explanation of one assumption. Be specific, and spend the five minutes having a clarifying conversation: “Your recommendation is clear. What I need is the reasoning behind the revenue estimate.” This kind of reflection on our thinking and responses helps us catch unintended consequences. Check what they understood before they spend an evening revising.
4. What have I added without deciding what can stop?
That 'quick request' you make takes time, even if it only takes twelve seconds to assign it. Look at the last thing you added to someone’s workload. Did you adjust anything else to make room for it? Use your five minutes to make the trade-off explicit: “This takes priority over the monthly report, so you can move that deadline to next week.” Otherwise, we’re leaving them to guess about priorities, to negotiate competing commitments, or to extend their day to accommodate ours. Or all three.
5. What feedback am I withholding that someone needs to succeed?
You want to keep editing and rewriting someone’s recommendations because they buried the decision under pages of background. They may think you enjoy editing, and maybe you do, but your five minutes would be better spent identifying one example and the change you need: “Please revise this to lead with your recommendation, then include the background that supports it.” If the issue needs a fuller conversation, use five minutes to schedule and prepare for it. Repeatedly fixing someone's work without explaining why leaves them dependent on corrections they could learn to make themselves.
WHEN FIVE MINUTES WON’T FIX IT
These five-minute fixes can prevent some avoidable work today, and can smooth out areas of leadership friction, but they can't compensate for a system that expects heroics on the daily, or leadership roles designed without enough time to actually lead well.
Some leaders have genuinely unreasonable workloads. Suggesting they can solve that with better habits simply hands exhausted people another to-do.
If developing people is truly part of the job, organizations need to leave capacity for it. Persistent overload calls for decisions about what stops and which decisions and responsibilities can move down the chain. And that includes examining the workloads we set for our own teams.
Executive coaching can help you recognize the patterns that keep work coming back to you, and explore what makes them difficult to change. If you’re seeing yourself in these questions, I’d welcome an exploratory conversation about how coaching could support you.
YOUR COACHING CHALLENGE
For the next week, carve out five minutes each day to address one thing your team is having to work around. Choose one of these practices, then check whether your action helped.
Start with something manageable, and see what becomes easier for both you and your team. Those five minutes might give everyone a little breathing room.
For more leadership articles, connect with Leslie Rohonczy on LinkedIn, or visit www.leslierohonczy.com