The hidden fees of ignoring individual capacity.
Most people know the feeling of living close to the edge of their bank account. You may not have the exact number memorized, but you carry a rough balance in your head. And when you’re about to swipe the card, you sometimes pause and think: “If I do this, I might overdraft.”
Leadership works the same way. Every person on your team has a cognitive balance: an account of attention, focus, resilience, and emotional bandwidth. You may not see the number on a dashboard, but if you’re paying attention, you know when someone is close to zero. Delegating in that moment without regard for their balance is what I call cognitive overdrafting: withdrawing mental funds that aren’t really there.
The problem is that organizations often pretend every employee in the same role has the same balance, capacity, and output speed. They don’t. Some can handle more, some less. Overdrafting happens when you ignore the individual’s capacity, pile on work, and then blame them for the inevitable shortfall. The cost is twofold: the individual pays interest in stress and burnout, while the organization eats hidden costs in turnover, bad judgments, and mislabeled “low performers.”
Most leaders already know, intuitively, when they’re about to overdraft someone. They can see the warning signs: missed details, shorter patience, diminished creativity, fatigue creeping into their tone. But instead of pausing, they push ahead, often because the system tells them to treat people like interchangeable widgets. That’s when overdraft fees start piling up.
The antidote is awareness paired with discipline. Stop pretending capacity is uniform. Allocate work based on demonstrated performance, not role title or wishful thinking. This is where frameworks like Outcomes Over Optics and Collaborate by Contract help. OOO keeps your focus on results instead of appearances, ensuring you reward what people can actually deliver. CBC forces clarity and explicit commitments, which makes it harder to hide overdrafts behind vague expectations. Together, they nudge you to assign work that matches proven merit, not abstract averages.
Cognitive overdrafting is an easy trap because it feels invisible in the moment. But just like a bank account, the costs show up eventually: interest charges you didn’t plan for, in the form of disengagement and decline. Protect against overdrafting. Respect the balance each person carries, and you’ll not only get better results, you’ll keep the account healthy enough to grow.
