Why Most New Managers Are Overextended (And How to Fix It)

Shelley Lewis
May 5
11 min read

And How To Fix It

I am going to tell you something about myself that did not become fully clear until I retired.

Throughout my career, I was the consummate overextended manager. I led finance and HR teams while continuing to carry a significant portion of my own technical work. In an entrepreneurial environment where even the president did not have an administrative assistant, I regularly absorbed responsibilities that were not mine to hold. I kept activities as the team grew rather than handing them off. I did the work because I cared about my team's workload and did not want to add to it. I managed their overtime more carefully than I managed my own.

When I retired, I watched my replacement step into the same pattern. I recognized it immediately because I had lived it for years. I sat him down and said, clearly and directly, "Hand off the work. Share the load with your team. This is no way to live, and it is not the job."

What I did not say, but wish I had understood earlier, is that the overextension I had normalized was not just a personal burden. It was a management failure because the work I was protecting was no longer mine to do.

The work you are protecting is no longer yours to do. Holding onto it is not a sign of commitment. It is quietly holding your team back.

This is the central problem of the overextended manager: protecting work that should be shared. And it is far more common than most organizations acknowledge.

The Data Tells a Clear Story

Gallup's research on manager time allocation found that managers spend a median of 40 percent of their time on individual contributor work. That means nearly half of a typical manager's working week is spent on tasks that fall outside their core leadership responsibilities.1

On the surface, that might seem acceptable. Finance managers stay close to the

numbers. Accounting managers maintain technical oversight. The player-coach model has long been normalized in professional services.

But Gallup's finding goes further. Managers who spend more than 40 percent of their time on individual contributor work lead less engaged teams, regardless of their team size. The tipping point is not theoretical. It is measurable. When a manager crosses that threshold, their team begins to pay for it.

McKinsey's research reinforces this from the other direction: only 10 to 40 percent of a typical manager's time is spent on value-added activities such as coaching, developing people, and building team capability.2 The rest is absorbed by administrative tasks, meetings, reactive problem-solving, and work that should either be delegated or eliminated.

Put those two findings together, and a clear thesis emerges: managers are spending too much time on the wrong work and not enough time on the work that actually makes a team function well.

For new managers, this gap is even more pronounced.

Why New Managers Are Especially Vulnerable

Overextension is not a character flaw. It is the predictable result of stepping into

management without a clear understanding of what the role requires.

The Center for Creative Leadership found that 26 percent of first-time managers feel they were not ready to lead others to begin with.3 When you do not feel confident in the new role, you gravitate toward the old one. The work you know how to do. The work that feels productive. The work that once defined your value.

This is not avoidance. It is a completely rational response to the discomfort of conscious incompetence, the stage where you are acutely aware of everything you do not yet know how to do as a manager. When that discomfort sets in, the familiar path is to return to what made you excellent before the promotion.

For finance and accounting professionals, that path is particularly well-worn. The work is specific. The standards are exacting. You have spent years developing deep technical expertise and being recognized for it. The idea that you should now step back from that work, let others do it, and trust that it will be done to the right standard is genuinely difficult. It feels like a loss of control and a loss of identity in the same motion.

There are also practical pressures. Finance teams run on deadlines. Month-end does not wait. Audit preparation does not pause because the manager is still learning how to manage. In those moments, picking up the work yourself is not just tempting. It can feel responsible.

Staying in execution mode feels productive. But it is not management. And over time, it costs everyone, including your team, because the work that develops people and prevents problems is getting left undone.

The Hidden Cost of Doing Too Much

The most obvious cost of overextension is personal. The late nights. The weekend work. The creeping sense that the job is impossible to get on top of. These are real, and they deserve acknowledgment.

But the less visible cost is what it does to the people around you. It shows up in the way your team develops, or fails to develop, under your management.

It Limits Your Team's Development

When you do work that belongs to your team, you deprive them of the opportunity to do it. That sounds obvious stated plainly, but the implications run deep: they lose the chance to build skill, confidence, and ownership.

Every time you step in and complete a task rather than coaching someone through it, you are making a decision about their development. You are choosing your short-term efficiency over their long-term capability. And you are making that decision repeatedly, across months and years, in ways that compound.

The team member who never gets the hard assignment does not develop the skills that the assignment would have built. The team member whose mistakes are quietly corrected does not learn to catch their own errors. The team member whose projects are monitored too closely does not build the judgment that comes from owning outcomes.

An overextended manager, almost always with the best of intentions, can inadvertently produce a team that is more dependent, less capable, and less confident than it should be, which makes the manager's effort work against its own purpose. That is the development cost of doing too much yourself.

It Sends the Wrong Signal About Authority

When a manager is visibly doing individual contributor work alongside their team, it creates ambiguity about roles and authority. The team is watching. They notice what you do with your time. And what they often conclude is one of two things: either the work is not really theirs to own, or the manager does not trust them to own it.

Neither conclusion supports the kind of team environment that produces good work. Trust and clear accountability are the foundations of a high-functioning team, and when those are weakened, the team's results suffer. And that affects what the team can accomplish next.

It Prevents the Real Work of Management

The highest cost is what does not happen while you are doing work that is not yours.

The performance conversation that gets deferred. The team member who needs coaching but does not get it because there is no time. The problem that is emerging slowly but is getting missed because the manager is too busy executing to observe. The team dynamic that is quietly deteriorating while the manager is heads-down in a spreadsheet.

Management work is observational, relational, and proactive by nature. It requires the kind of attention that execution work crowds out. You cannot do both fully at the same time. And when you try, the payoff of management disappears, because the work that improves people and performance gets pushed aside. That is why overextension becomes so costly.

Why Caring About Your Team Can Make It Worse

I want to say something that I mean sincerely, because it applies directly to why I overextended myself for so long.

The managers who are most vulnerable to overextension are often the ones who care most about their teams.

I held onto work because I worried about my team's workload. I absorbed administrative tasks because I did not want to add to the pressure my team was already under. I stayed late finishing things myself because assigning them felt like adding to someone else's burden.

The logic is not wrong. It comes from a genuine place of concern and respect for the people you lead.

But it carries a hidden assumption: that the team cannot handle the additional work, or that adding to their responsibilities is inherently unkind. Neither of those things is necessarily true. In many cases, the better move is to develop capacity rather than avoid the work.

In practice, most people want meaningful work. They want to be trusted with it. They want to develop through it. Protecting them from it, under the guise of caring about their workload, can deny them the very experiences that build their confidence and their careers.

The most caring thing a manager can do for their team is not to absorb the work. It is to develop their capacity to handle it, so the team becomes stronger and more capable over time.

Protecting your team from work is not kindness. It is a quiet form of under-investment in their growth that limits what they can become. That is why care sometimes requires handing off the work.

A Practical Audit for the Overextended Manager

If you recognize yourself in any of this, the next step is not guilt. It is clarity. Here is a practical starting point for changing the pattern.

Step 1: Track Your Time for One Week

Not forever. Not with a complicated system. Just for one week, note in broad categories how you are actually spending your time.

Individual contributor work (tasks you are doing yourself that could be done by a team member)
Administrative work (emails, scheduling, reporting, approvals)
Management work (coaching, feedback, one-on-ones, planning, problem-solving with your team)
Reactive work (interruptions, urgent issues, fires)

Most managers who do this exercise for the first time are surprised by what they find. The category that usually dominates is not what they expected, and that is where the real work begins.

Step 2: Ask Three Questions

Look at the individual contributor work column and ask:

Does this work genuinely require my specific expertise, or am I doing it because it is faster than explaining it to someone else?
If I handed this off, what would the team member gain from doing it?
Am I holding onto this because it is necessary, or because letting go feels uncomfortable?

There is no judgment in these questions. They are diagnostic. The answers will tell you more than any framework can.

Step 3: Identify One Thing to Stop Doing This Month

Not everything. Just one thing. One task or responsibility that belongs to your team, not to you.

The goal is not a complete transformation in a single week. The goal is to begin shifting the balance. One deliberate handoff, done thoughtfully, builds both your confidence in delegating and your team's confidence in receiving.

That is the beginning of a different way of working.

What Organizations Need to Understand

Manager overextension is not purely an individual problem. It is also an organizational one.

In many finance and accounting environments, the player-coach model is not just tolerated. It is expected. Managers are hired partly for their technical capability and are implicitly expected to contribute directly, not just to lead. That expectation, when left unexamined, creates a structural trap.

The manager tries to meet both sets of expectations simultaneously. They try to be an excellent individual contributor and an excellent manager at the same time. And because the individual contributor work is more concrete, more measurable, and more immediately rewarded, it tends to crowd out the management work that is harder to see and slower to yield results.

Gallup's data shows that 97 percent of managers report having some individual contributor responsibilities in addition to leading others.1 The question is not whether managers should have any individual contributor responsibilities. In many finance and accounting roles, some technical involvement is appropriate and valuable. The question is whether the balance is deliberately set or whether it has simply accumulated over time without anyone stopping to examine it.

Organizations that want effective managers need to make that examination part of how they define and support the role. The transition from individual contributor to manager is not just a title change. It requires a genuine reallocation of what the role demands, including a clear-eyed conversation about where the manager's time should actually go.

Without that conversation, the default is overextension. And overextension is expensive, in burnout, in team underperformance, and in the quiet erosion of the management capability the organization was trying to build when it made the promotion.

Where to Start

If you are a new manager reading this, the most useful reframing I can offer is this: the work you are protecting is no longer yours. Not because you are no longer capable of doing it. Because doing it is no longer the job.

Your job now is to make your team capable, confident, and well-directed. That requires your presence, your attention, and your time. Not your individual output.

The adjustment is not immediate. It is not comfortable. And it is not linear. But the direction is clear: less doing, more enabling. Less absorbing, more developing. Less protecting your team from the work, and more trusting them to grow through it.

If you are an organizational leader or HR professional reading this, the question worth asking is: what expectations are we setting for our managers? Are we asking them to be effective leaders, or to be excellent individual contributors who also happen to manage people? Because in most cases, you cannot fully have both.

The choice about where your managers spend their time is not just a personal productivity question. It is a decision about what kind of teams and what kind of organization you are building.

About the Author

Shelley Lewis-Mercier is a CPA, MBA (HR Specialization), and ICF-Certified Coach with over 30 years of experience leading finance and HR teams. As a former CFO and senior HR executive, she has lived the pattern of overextension from the inside and spent years watching it repeat among the managers around her. She is the founder of Foundation First, a manager readiness program for first-time managers in finance and accounting.

Learn more at manager readiness.com.

Endnotes

1. Gallup, Inc. "Span of Control: What's the Optimal Team Size for Managers?" Gallup Workplace, January 2026. The research draws on Gallup's U.S. study of manager time allocation and team engagement across a broad cross-section of industries. Note on team size: Gallup reports a median team size of five to six direct reports per manager. The widely cited figure of 12.1 is a mean average skewed by a small number of very large teams and is not representative of the typical manager's experience.

https://www.gallup.com/workplace/700718/span-control-optimal-team-size-managers.aspx

2. De Smet, Aaron, Monica McGurk, and Marc Vinson. "Unlocking the Potential of Frontline Managers." McKinsey Quarterly, August 2009. This foundational McKinsey research documented that frontline managers spend 30 to 60 percent of their time on administrative work and meetings, and 10 to 50 percent on non-managerial tasks, leaving as little as 10 to 40 percent for value-added activities such as coaching and team development. The finding has been consistently cited and reaffirmed in subsequent McKinsey research on manager effectiveness.

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational performance/our-insights/unlocking-the-potential-of-frontline-managers

3. Center for Creative Leadership. "First-Time Manager Challenges: 12 Common Challenges of New Managers." CCL.org, October 2024. CCL's research on nearly 300 emerging leaders documents the most common challenges facing first-time managers, including unpreparedness for the role, difficulties with identity transition, and a tendency to revert to individual contributor behaviors under pressure.

https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/first-time-managers-must-conquer-these challenges/