Picture this: The executive team announces a productivity reset. Expectations are clarified. The CEO speaks. The slide deck is polished. The firm-wide meeting lands exactly as planned.
For a moment, it feels decisive. Then the follow-up emails begin.
Managers ask what the new standards mean in practice. Teams interpret expectations differently. A few employees push back directly. More whisper quietly. Confusion builds. A month later, the issue is back on the executive agenda.
Sound familiar?
When productivity pushes don’t land cleanly, they don’t always fail loudly. Sometimes there’s visible resistance. More often, they unravel slowly—through uneven adoption, duplicated employee effort, and escalating clarification cycles—until the initiative quietly boomerangs back to the executive team.
The visible cost looks like friction. The invisible cost is executive rework.
The Anxiety Is Real. The Diagnosis Isn’t Always.
Nearly half of CEOs now rank productivity as their top priority. Hybrid work has weakened traditional visibility cues. AI is increasing output faster than leaders can interpret it. Boards are demanding measurable gains.
The pressure to do more—with fewer people, tighter timelines, and presumably smarter tools—is real.
But the evidence tells a more complicated story.
Large-scale research shows that productivity has largely held steady in hybrid environments—and in many cases improved. At the same time, AI adoption has surged, even as 42% of companies have abandoned at least one AI initiative and over 95% of GenAI pilots struggle to produce durable ROI.
Output is increasing.
Quality work is not.
What looks like a productivity problem is increasingly an alignment problem.
When executives aren’t aligned on how productivity is defined, measured, and reinforced, initiatives stall. Exceptions multiply. Decisions are reopened. Bandwidth shrinks.
And every relaunch subtly teaches the organization that direction is provisional.
What Chiefs of Staff See First
Over the past several months, I’ve been interviewing Chiefs of Staff across industries to understand how this pressure is playing out behind the scenes.
What they describe isn’t laziness or resistance.
It’s misinterpretation.
One Chief of Staff told me:
Leaders think they’ve communicated it. But how people hear it—and what actually sticks—can be very different.
Another shared:
I talk people off ledges—and that is a productivity gain.
What I’m hearing from Chiefs of Staff on the ground in their organizations captures something executives don’t always see: Productivity doesn’t just amount to more output. Enabling high performance comes down to clarity, confidence, and trust in how decisions are made.
Chiefs of Staff are often the first to detect when productivity pressure is being interpreted as risk rather than opportunity. They translate intent downward and frustration upward. They anticipate where expectations will collide. They absorb escalation before it reaches the CEO.
As one put it:
You need the chief-of-staff kind of mind to figure out the process, the plan—who needs to be involved, what might get in the way—and then see it all the way through.
That’s not just coordination.
It’s alignment architecture.
Chiefs of Staff are not just implementing productivity initiatives. They are pressure-testing them—asking:
- What will this displace?
- Where will this break?
- Who will experience this differently?
- What happens if this doesn’t land the way we expect?
Because when those questions aren’t answered before rollout, they get answered after—at the executive level.
And that’s the bandwidth tax no one is measuring.
The Constraint That Changes Everything
There is a hard limit in every productivity initiative.
Translation has limits.
Trust-brokering has limits.
Execution design has limits.
And that limit is signal.
As one Chief of Staff put it:
If I don’t understand what people are actually experiencing, I can’t design anything that will work.
In hybrid, AI-enabled, fast-moving organizations, friction is uneven. Signal is uneven. Candor is uneven. No one—no matter how trusted—can rely on instinct alone to align a system this complex.
And when alignment is guesswork, productivity becomes cyclical: launch, confusion, correction, relaunch.
The Chiefs of Staff I’m speaking with are increasingly clear on this: Productivity doesn’t fail because expectations are too high. It fails when alignment comes too late.
If you’re navigating productivity pressure right now, you’re not alone. More and more Chiefs of Staff are recognizing that their leverage isn’t in pushing harder—it’s in aligning sooner. And that’s a very different kind of productivity work.
Stay tuned for more insights from these conversations soon.
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