By: Kate Sarmiento
Most leadership advice fits on a coffee mug, which is a big reason it falls apart the moment a leader’s life gets complicated. Dr. Sharon Spano, founder of Spano & Company, works with CEOs, coaches, consultants, and entrepreneurs who did what the advice said and still feel stuck. Her Leader’s Edge program is written for people who’ve reached six and seven figures and built teams around them, and who still wonder if they’ve got what it takes to lead. Tell someone like that to manage their time better or push harder toward the goal, and the tip ignores the people and pressures sitting behind every decision they make.
So what does the tip skip? Plenty. A calendar has a team waiting on answers, clients who want results, and a family that expects the leader at the dinner table, and those people don’t always want the same things. Advice that treats the calendar as the problem never touches any of that, which means a leader can follow it perfectly and end the month just as stretched as before.
The numbers for managers aren’t encouraging either. Global manager engagement has dropped nine percentage points since 2022, and that slide is largely behind the decline in engagement across the global workforce (Source: Gallup, 2026). It’s worth looking at exactly where the usual advice runs out.
Sure, Wake Up at 5 A.M. and See Who Notices
“Manage your time better” is a classic piece of advice, and it puts the whole problem on the calendar. A calendar only holds what a leader already said yes to, and every yes came with a person who expects something back. A tighter system can squeeze more yeses into a week, yet it can’t shrink a single one of them.
Time research points the same way. Over the two decades before 2020, global wealth went up, and most people still reported feeling like they had too much to do and too little time to do it, a feeling tied to lower well-being, worse physical health, and lower productivity (Source: Nature Human Behaviour, 2020). More money didn’t buy more time. Even the payoff from time management seems to depend on how the day feels to the person living it, since in two groups of UK adults the link between time management and well-being ran entirely through whether people felt their time was well spent. That feeling came from activities that fit who they were, a good balance, efficient use of hours, and a sense of control (Source: Frontiers in Psychology, 2024).
Pushing harder has a similar flaw. It works fine when one goal sits at the center of a leader’s life, but it gets messy when a revenue target and a household with its own needs tug in opposite directions, because the extra effort can’t go to both. Dr. Spano’s Leader’s Edge page calls the usual lines soundbite leadership and lists a few of them: make sure your team feels seen and heard, don’t elevate profit over relationships, be accessible to all people at all times, and never be a top-down leader. All of that sounds right in theory. Stack those lines on top of each other, though, and a leader ends up trying to be reachable by everyone while protecting both profit and relationships at the same moment. Take “accessible to all people at all times.” That leaves no hours that belong only to family, and family matters most according to Dr. Spano’s core values.
Your Old Scoreboard Is Still Keeping Score, and Nobody Updated the Rules
Somewhere along the way, every leader picks a number or a title or a team size and decides that reaching it means success. Once that choice is made, it ends up deciding which invitations get accepted and which ones get turned down. Life keeps moving after the choice, though. A business grows, a team gets bigger, a family needs something new, and the original definition has no idea any of it happened.
Dr. Spano has a name for one version of this problem: the Emptiness of Success. The idea is that a leader can have the results and put in the effort and still be sure something’s missing, with no clue what it is. Two quick questions can show whether that’s happening. Think back to the last big goal you hit, and ask yourself if it felt the way you expected it to. Then scan the last handful of things you said yes to and count how many of them got that yes only because somebody in your seat is supposed to say it.
Dr. Spano also looks at where a leader falls among the 12 stages of human development, and she teaches that the stage a person is in shapes how they experience time, money, and success. Then there are the 4 Hidden Loyalties, which she says keep leaders stuck in the Emptiness of Success. All of this matters for your calendar, since a definition of success from an earlier stage can keep making your choices for you even after it stops fitting the life you have.
Questions Worth Asking Before the Next Yes
Rewriting a definition of success can start with the calendar you already have. Look at the last two weeks and find the hours when your energy runs highest, then check who got them. Did you hand those hours out on purpose, or did they go to whoever asked first? If it was the second one, the calendar has been following other people’s priorities.
Then think about who would pay if your current goal landed exactly as written. Write down real names, yours included. A goal can look great on a spreadsheet and still cost a spouse their evenings or a team its weekends, and a name on paper is a lot harder to wave away than a vague feeling.
Ask whose approval the goal still depends on, too. If it was set to impress someone who no longer has a say in your life, it deserves a second look, and the only way to find out is to ask. A related question is what you’d drop if success meant a good life for the people closest to you just as much as a strong quarter. Whatever pops into your head first is a good candidate for your next no.
Last, go through the past month of your calendar and mark every commitment you accepted because it matched your old picture of success. Change one of them, give those hours to something that fits the life you have now, and watch what happens to your energy and to the people around you. One change at a time is plenty to show whether the definition needs rewriting.
Ready to Rewrite the Scoreboard?
If these questions hit close to home, Dr. Spano works with leaders one-on-one. She has a PhD in Human and Organizational Systems and wrote The Pursuit of Time and Money. Her private Systemic Mapping sessions are meant to help leaders find the hidden obstacles standing between them and the next level, and to show them how to bring work and life together without giving up their vision or goals.
If you’re ready to rewrite your own definition of success, book a Systemic Mapping session with Dr. Spano and the team at Spano & Company.
