On most workdays, the modern professional begins with a familiar ritual: scanning a calendar packed with overlapping meetings, confronting a to-do list that feels impossibly long, and juggling initiatives that all claim urgency. Transformation projects run parallel to growth targets. Culture-building sits alongside compliance mandates. Employee engagement surveys coincide with system upgrades. Everyone appears busy, yet paradoxically, progress feels glacial. The organisation moves, but not necessarily forward.
This reveals the quiet cost of macrotasking—when organisations treat every initiative as mission-critical and expect teams to drive multiple large priorities simultaneously. Unlike multitasking, which fragments individual attention across tasks, macrotasking fractures organisational focus. Teams are asked to execute performance transformations alongside culture resets, compliance changes alongside growth initiatives, and digital shifts alongside engagement programmes—all at once.
The pattern stems from a leadership challenge: the inability, or reluctance, to choose. When leaders avoid clearly sequencing priorities, managers and employees must interpret importance themselves. Everything becomes important, which means nothing truly is.
The illusion of momentum
Satyajit Mohanty, VP-HR, Dabur India, observes this pattern repeatedly. “We often mistake ambition for effectiveness,” he explains. “When leaders declare too many priorities at once, they don’t create momentum—they create noise. People then spend more time navigating priorities than delivering outcomes.”
“When priorities are unclear or poorly sequenced, review forums turn into blame games. The discussion shifts from solving the problem to defending positions, because the system itself is overloaded.”
Emmanuel David, Senior HR Leader
What follows is a culture of perpetual busyness, where work happens everywhere yet little feels complete. “Macrotasking gives the illusion of productivity,” Mohanty notes. “There are meetings, dashboards and reviews, but very little depth. Execution suffers because people are constantly switching contexts instead of seeing things through.”
This erosion of focus manifests most clearly in review meetings. Emmanuel David, a senior HR leader, recalls a large organisational initiative that began with structure and optimism. “There was a charter drawn up and people were working. Initially, everything went well.” Over time, however, progress stalled. Reviews became tense. Accountability bounced between consultants, mid-level managers and leadership. “There was a lot of flamestorming,” he admits—heated conversations where pressure mounted but clarity did not.
David notes such situations rarely stem from insufficient effort. “When priorities are unclear or poorly sequenced, review forums turn into blame games. The discussion shifts from solving the problem to defending positions, because the system itself is overloaded.”
His organisation had attempted to strengthen performance management, employee communication and recognition simultaneously. Each initiative mattered, but together they competed for attention and resources. “If you focus on everything, you end up missing out,” David reflects.
The sequencing imperative
David’s breakthrough came from understanding independent and dependent variables. By strengthening performance management first, other elements—recognition, communication, engagement—would naturally align. This insight proved transformative, though it required leadership courage to pause seemingly important initiatives.
Mohanty strongly agrees. “Sequencing is one of the most underrated leadership skills. You cannot build trust, engagement or recognition on weak systems. Leaders must decide what needs sustained attention now and what can wait, even if all of it feels important.”
The challenge lies in distinguishing between what appears urgent and what genuinely matters. Macrotasking creates organisations where urgent drowns out important, leaving strategic initiatives perpetually subordinate to immediate demands. Teams address symptoms whilst root causes remain untouched.
The trust erosion
The real damage of macrotasking, however, isn’t operational—it’s emotional. David describes how employee communication forums launched with enthusiasm. Employees spoke openly, issues surfaced, and expectations rose. But managers, stretched across too many priorities, struggled to act on even minor policy changes. The same concerns—around equity, reimbursements and follow-ups—were raised repeatedly without resolution. Eventually, attendance dropped. Employees disengaged.
“That’s the critical moment,” Mohanty observes. “Employees don’t disengage because they are unwilling to contribute. They disengage because they stop believing their effort will lead to action. When conversations don’t translate into outcomes, trust erodes quietly.”
This dynamic creates particularly acute pressure for middle managers. Sitting at the intersection of strategy and delivery, they translate broad mandates into daily action. With limited authority to deprioritise, they attempt to keep everything alive—often at the cost of depth, quality, and their own wellbeing. Over time, this produces a culture of superficial compliance rather than committed ownership.
The organisational cost compounds: teams stay late, leaders push harder, initiatives multiply, yet outcomes remain underwhelming. “Busyness is not progress,” Mohanty notes. “If people are exhausted but impact is low, it’s usually a prioritisation failure—not a capability issue.”
The focus dividend
When David’s organisation finally chose focus over frenzy, the shift proved tangible. A performance management survey showing 42 per cent satisfaction became the single area of attention. Leaders invested deeply in goal-setting, feedback and clarity. Over two years, satisfaction rose to 82 per cent.
“When energy gets dissipated, it affects morale and how people see the organisation,” David explains. Focus, he discovered, wasn’t a constraint—it was an accelerator. By directing sustained attention to one critical system, the organisation created conditions for broader improvements.
Mohanty frames this as a lesson many organisations learn too late. “Transformation doesn’t happen in bursts of attention. It requires sustained focus. You cannot drive meaningful change while constantly distracting the organisation with new mandates.”
The 40-percentage-point improvement in David’s case resulted not from new programmes but from removing distractions. Teams gained permission to see something through rather than perpetually starting new initiatives. This depth of engagement, rarely achieved in macrotasking environments, proved far more valuable than simultaneous shallow efforts across multiple fronts.
The leadership discipline
The antidote to macrotasking isn’t fewer ambitions but disciplined prioritisation. It requires leaders to ask uncomfortable questions: What must succeed first for everything else to work? What can wait without genuine damage? And critically, where will we place sustained leadership attention?
As David articulates: “If senior leaders are not aligned and focused, the areas they lead will quietly die.” This observation captures macrotasking’s essential failure—the assumption that declaring something important makes it so. In reality, importance derives from sustained attention, not merely stated intention.
The discipline of prioritisation demands acknowledging trade-offs rather than pretending they don’t exist. It requires telling teams what won’t receive attention this quarter, not merely what will. This clarity, whilst initially uncomfortable, prevents the exhausting theatre of pretending everything matters equally.
Breaking the macrotasking cycle also demands redefining how organisations measure leadership effectiveness. The leader who launches ten initiatives appears more dynamic than one who sees three through to completion. Yet organisational health depends on the latter, not the former.
In an age obsessed with speed and scale, focus has become the most undervalued leadership capability. Organisations celebrate those who juggle multiple priorities whilst quietly struggling with poor execution. The cultural message becomes clear: breadth matters more than depth, activity more than accomplishment.
Yet the evidence suggests otherwise. David’s 82 per cent satisfaction score emerged from concentration, not proliferation. His team’s morale improved not from doing more but from completing something meaningful. The lesson challenges contemporary management orthodoxy: sometimes the path to achieving more requires attempting less—but doing it properly.
When everything is treated as a priority, nothing truly moves. The cost extends beyond missed targets to include eroded trust, exhausted teams, and organisations that appear busy whilst standing still. The solution requires leadership courage to choose—and discipline to stay the course.
Source – https://www.hrkatha.com/features/macrotasking-when-everything-becomes-nothing/