Friday Leadership Report | Alan Kearns, Founder & Managing Partner, CareerJoy
Happy Friday,
I was standing in a Starbucks line last week, half listening to the order ahead of me. Oat milk, half sweet, extra hot, one pump instead of two. It took the barista three tries to get it right. I did some digging afterward and found the number that stopped me.
Starbucks has said publicly that its menu supports somewhere north of 170,000 possible drink combinations. Some estimates put the real number, once you count every modifier, well into the millions.
Nobody needs that many ways to order coffee. And yet here we are, standing in line, quietly exhausted by our own freedom to choose.
That is not just a coffee problem.
It is a leadership problem.
Many leaders we coach are drowning in optionality.
Which project gets resourced first. Which of six software tools the team should standardize on. Which of the four ways to deliver difficult feedback fits this particular person.
Robert Half Canada’s research, reported through The Logic, found that roughly one in four Canadian workers now describe themselves as burnt out, up from about one in five just a year earlier.
That is not a productivity problem. It is a volume problem. Too many open doors, not enough walls to lean against.
We have built a culture that treats unlimited options as a gift to leaders. I think it is closer to a trap.
A story crossed my desk about a training method called the Constraints Led Approach, or CLA, that is quietly reshaping how elite athletes learn.
For decades, sports training worked like this. Break a skill into its smallest parts, drill each part in isolation, hope it transfers to the chaos of a real game. Researchers now call this block training, and the evidence says it produces players who look perfect in practice and freeze under real pressure.
The CLA flips that model. Coaches deliberately add restrictions, a smaller playing area, a heavier ball, a defender who is not allowed to use his hands, and force the athlete to solve the problem in front of them, right now, with limited tools.
WNBA champion Kelsey Plum described what that shift did for her career. She said, “It changed my career.” Before the CLA, she was skilled but not purposeful. The constraint gave her purpose.
Kenny Atkinson brought this thinking into his interview for the Cleveland Cavaliers head coaching job, built around the idea that removing options, not adding them, was the path to a sharper team.
Professor Keith Davids, who coined the term CLA back in 1994, put it simply. He said, “Context shapes everything.” Take a person out of a realistic, limited environment and you do not get a better decision maker. You get someone who has only ever practised in a vacuum.
Liverpool’s goalkeeping coach, Fabian Otte, took this even further with his players. Anfield on a big match day is roughly 60,000 people singing at full volume, and no training pitch can replicate that noise. So Otte did the opposite of what you would expect.
Instead of piping in crowd noise to simulate the chaos, he handed his goalkeepers, including a global star like Alisson, construction earmuffs that blocked out sound entirely.
Strip away one input, and the brain has no choice but to sharpen the others. His players learned to read the game visually, without the audio cues they had always leaned on. When the real crowd noise hit on match day, they were already prepared for something harder than what they would actually face.
That is the part I keep coming back to. Otte did not add a variable. He removed one, on purpose, and the removal is what built the skill.
Here is what struck me. The athletes who thrive under the CLA are not the ones with the most options. They are the ones who have learned to find the one right move inside a tight, well-designed box. Fewer choices, sharper reads, faster execution.
In our own leadership work at CareerJoy, captured over the years, we hear a version of this constantly from senior leaders across the federal public service,, the Canadian Forces, health care and financial services.
The leaders who feel most in control are rarely the ones with the most options on the table. They are the ones who have built deliberate limits into how they decide.
A rule that says no more than three vendors get considered. A standing meeting that only allows two agenda items. A personal policy of never answering an email in the first hour of the day.
The constraint is not a restriction. It is the thing that makes a fast, confident decision possible.
Unlimited choice feels like freedom. In practice, it is often just friction wearing a nicer name.
The Robert Half Canada data is worth sitting with for a moment longer. Nearly a quarter of the Canadian workforce is telling researchers they are running on empty, and the trend line is moving the wrong way. Fatigue, low motivation, and slipping efficiency were the top three symptoms respondents named.
None of that surprises me. What does surprise me is how rarely we treat the volume of decisions a person faces in a day as the actual root cause. We treat burnout as a workload problem when it is often a choice architecture problem.
A leader who has to make forty unstructured decisions before lunch is not weak. They are undersupported by their own systems.
You do not need a sports science lab to apply this. Pick one area of your leadership where options have quietly multiplied past the point of usefulness. Maybe it is how you run one-on-ones. Maybe it is how many channels your team uses to reach you. Maybe it is how many strategic priorities you are technically holding at once.
Cut it down to a number that forces a sharper read. Three priorities, not nine. Two communication channels, not five. One consistent framework for hard conversations, not four depending on your mood.
Then hold the line. The constraint only works if it is real.
I think about this every time I board a WestJet flight. A pilot does not have unlimited options for how to respond to turbulence or a system alert. They have a checklist, built from decades of removing variables that do not matter so the ones that do stand out immediately.
Nobody would call that checklist a limitation on the pilot’s judgment. It is what makes fast, sound judgment possible at thirty-five thousand feet. Our teams deserve the same kind of scaffolding, whether that shows up in how you run a hiring process, how you structure a budget review, or how you decide what earns a place on this week’s agenda.
The same applies to hiring, an area where I watch leaders drown themselves in optionality more than almost any other. A search with twelve open criteria and no ranking produces a slower, worse decision than a search built around three non-negotiables and a clear tiebreaker.
The constraint is not there to limit the talent pool. It is there to let you actually recognize the right person when they show up.
This week’s [LQ] question
Where in your leadership have you mistaken more options for more freedom, and what would you have to cut to find your own version of Kelsey Plum’s purposeful game?
I will be thinking about that Starbucks line differently from now on. Sometimes the kindest thing a leader can do, for themselves and for their team, is close a few doors on purpose.
Along the road with you,
Alan
Get a first look at the 2026 Work. Made Better. Report, exploring how leadership and workplace culture shape how people show up, support one another, and feel about the work they do.
Great leadership is about creating the right constraints to bring clarity, sharpen decisions, and help people move forward with confidence. Explore CareerJoy’s leadership solutions to build stronger leadership practices.
