Complexity and Competing Demands:
When Everything Feels Urgent
The Myth of the Finish Line
In school leadership, there’s often a quiet hope that at some point—maybe after the accreditation, after the board meeting, after this recruitment cycle—things will ease and the pace will become manageable.
It’s a lovely hope. But the truth is, there is no finish line.
Rather, a relentless flow of competing priorities: curriculum reviews, community events, safeguarding updates, new wellbeing initiatives, strategy priorities, staff needs, parent requests and more - all converge in a perpetual flow of demanding complexity. Left unchecked it can eat into our evenings, our weekends and our vacations.
Beyond the time spent on this, the cognitive load and the emotional drain places unsustainable demands on the resources of leaders. The more you care, the more depleting and exhausting it can be.
What Competing Demands Really Cost
When everything feels urgent, leaders can find themselves:
Reacting instead of responding.
Working longer while feeling less effective.
Saying yes when their values whisper “no.”
Losing sight of purpose in the fog of pressure.
Over time, even the most mission-driven leader can become trapped in a cycle of chronic business, where everything is important, but nothing feels satisfying.
A Systemic Challenge
Far from being a failure of individual discipline or time management, this is a systems-level issue—but it lands in the individual
As Kegan and Lahey note, “Most leadership development focuses on horizontal growth—skills and tools. But what leaders need is vertical development: the capacity to hold more complexity without being undone by it.”
This is where the self-leadership literacies of systems thinking and inner discernment become a lifeline.
Systems Literacy Meets Self-Literacy
Practicing systems literacy allows leaders to step back and see the broader patterns beneath the pileup—identifying leverage points, redundancies, and unspoken assumptions.
Paired with self-literacy, leaders can develop the inner clarity to ask:
What is truly mine to carry?
What am I reacting to that isn’t aligned with our shared purpose?
Where might I be confusing urgency with importance?
Where might my finite resources be best deployed in this moment?
While these questions do not eliminate complexity, they do create space within it—space to respond with wisdom rather than reflex. They allow for a moment conscious reflection to choose intentions and set directions that are aligned with your own priorities and beliefs, rather than being caught up in the tidal flow of meeting demands.
A Leader’s Inquiry
Next time your calendar feels unmanageable, try this brief check-in:
“What do I want to be responsible for—and what am I being responsible for, that I no longer believe in?”
What might I hand off or let go of completely?
This kind of discernment isn’t just freeing—it’s strategic. It refines your leadership to its most aligned and effective expression.
Continuing The Journey
The next post in this series—“Responsible Without Overfunctioning”—explores how to stay grounded in your values without taking on burdens that don’t belong to you.
For those ready to step off the treadmill of reactive leadership, the Self-Leadership for Educators course offers tools to build clarity, calm, and conscious prioritization—no matter how complex the demands.
Bridget
