Reading Time: 3 min
A treadmill has a strange logic. You can run faster, increase the incline, push through the fatigue.
Your effort rises. Your body works harder.
Yet, you are still in the same place. Work can sometimes feel like this too.
When progress slows, people do not always slow down with it. Sometimes they do the opposite. They check more, prepare more, stay closer to the detail, take on another problem, or step into decisions that were never really theirs to make.
From the outside, it can look like commitment. And often, it is. But underneath it can also be an attempt to recover something that feels increasingly uncertain – Influence.
Hard work itself is not always what exhausts us. People can put enormous energy into something difficult when they can see that their effort is making a difference. The long hours feel different when the problem gets solved. The difficult conversation feels different when something changes afterwards. Effort feels different when it leads somewhere. The experience changes when responsibility keeps growing but influence does not.
You are accountable for the outcome, but the decisions shaping it sit elsewhere.
You raise the same issue, but nothing moves. Priorities change, ownership blurs, and yet the expectation to deliver remains.
So you try another approach. Then another.
This is where resourcefulness can quietly become a trap. If effort has helped you solve problems before, the instinct is often to apply more effort when something stops working.
Before people stop trying, they may spend a long time trying harder.
That is the Influence gap – the distance between how much responsibility someone carries and how much influence they actually have over the outcome.
Organisations can create this gap simply through the way work is designed. Responsibility may sit close to the work, while key decisions sit elsewhere. People may be encouraged to take ownership, contribute ideas and deliver outcomes, even when not every condition affecting those outcomes is within their control.
When that happens, people often try to bridge the gap themselves.They work around unclear decisions. Absorb the ambiguity. Follow up again. Take on what has fallen between roles. Become the person who somehow keeps things moving.
For a while, this can make the organisation look functional. The work still gets done. But the effort required to keep it moving keeps rising.
Eventually, the problem becomes visible as exhaustion, disengagement, or someone simply stepping back. By then, the influence gap may have existed for a long time.
Perhaps sustainable ambition is not only about how much responsibility someone can carry. It may also depend on whether they have enough influence to make that responsibility meaningful.
Instead of asking –
Why has this person stopped trying?
Perhaps, we should ask –
How long were they trying harder before anyone noticed?
Because sometimes burnout begins where responsibility keeps growing, but influence does not.
~ Megha.
Founder @ OutoftheBurn
Ambition with Ease
