The Cost of Staying Effective

I didn’t notice this until halfway through a leadership meeting on reorganization.

We were working through decisions that needed to be finalized before the hour ended. Four people were being discussed, none of them in the room.

Their names had come up before. This time, the conversation moved efficiently as we summarized where things stood and reviewed possible paths forward. When we weighed the practical considerations, everyone spoke carefully. No one sounded careless or unkind.

But somewhere in the discussion, I felt something begin to shift.

The employees themselves began to recede. We were not considering what their lives actually felt like: the pressures they were carrying at home or the effort they’d put in to get where they were professionally. We no longer discussed the uncertainty they’d eventually have to absorb once our decisions were made.

Without anyone intending it, these four people had become easier to discuss than to imagine.

What remained were the parts of the situation we could organize, evaluate, and act upon.

As I listened, I realized I was moving in the same direction. I was following the logic of the discussion, contributing where I could, and helping move the conversation toward resolution. And I understood how hard it would be to keep the human reality of the situation fully present while also getting through the agenda in front of us.

Yet I think that’s how this kind of adaptation often begins. It’s subtle and rarely through conscious choice. We just accommodate gradually to what the environment rewards.

Systems require decisions to keep moving. So, movement trains our attention toward whatever feels manageable, actionable, and clear.

The Changes We Stop Seeing

Most of us enter professional life with our humanity intact. We care about people and want to contribute meaningfully. We assume that competence and decency can comfortably coexist.

And for a while, they often do.

But large systems ask us to function at a scale humans were not designed to fully absorb. Decisions accumulate as responsibilities widen. And as we rise in organizations, complexity increases so we learn to compress experience into forms we can manage.

Without that adaptation, most of us couldn’t sustain the responsibilities we carry.

Still, something else can happen alongside it: effectiveness begins shaping our perception.

We become practiced at moving quickly through situations without fully registering the lives inside them. We learn to translate lived experience into metrics, timelines, performance concerns, strategic priorities, or manageable categories.

And because this adaptation helps us succeed, we may not notice the shift. 

Over time, others begin relying on us. We become people who can make difficult decisions without visibly struggling under their weight, and we’re then seen as composed, capable, and clear-thinking.

But many of us eventually encounter a moment that unsettles us, even if we never say it aloud.

It’s the moment we realize we are participating in something affecting someone else’s life without experiencing them as a person while we do it.

It isn’t that we don’t care.

It’s that caring has become structurally irrelevant to the outcome.

That realization can be difficult to face because outwardly nothing striking has occurred. There’s been no cruelty or collapse of character. Just a gradual adjustment to what the environment continues rewarding.

Most harm inside large systems doesn’t begin with bad intentions.

It begins when human beings slowly lose contact with parts of themselves they no longer need in order to function effectively.

And once that distance becomes familiar, both we and our decisions are at risk.

What We Must Not Lose

The systems we inhabit shape us more than we realize. They influence what we notice, what we prioritize, and what we gradually learn to set aside.

But they needn’t fully determine the relationship we maintain with ourselves.

That relationship is shaped by how we behave in small moments throughout these difficult decisions. It rests in whether we pause before reducing someone to the role they occupy or the moment we notice ourselves withdrawing and choose to return our attention rather than continue past it.  It’s supported by genuinely remembering that the person in front of us has a life extending far beyond the version of them currently being evaluated, managed, or discussed.

These moments may alter how we behave, although they may not change every outcome. But what they do is essential. They preserve something that is difficult to recover once lost: the ability to stay alive inside our own experience.

A strange paradox of institutional life is that the more fully we inhabit our professional roles, the easier it becomes to forget that we ourselves are more than those roles.

Remaining human requires that we remember:  that we stay in contact with what we know and feel even when the environment no longer requires it.

Those moments accumulate.

In time, they shape a different kind of authority: the kind that comes from knowing we have not abandoned ourselves in order to succeed.

Practice Invitation

In the days ahead, notice moments when efficiency asks you to see someone primarily through the lens of their role, their usefulness, or their impact on the system around you.

Pause long enough to remember that their life extends far beyond what is visible to you here.

Then notice what changes in you when you do.

Over time, this becomes more than a momentary correction.

It is a way of staying in contact with your own humanity while living in systems that can easily pull you away from it.

*******

And that’s The Gist of It™: insights on relational courage — the courage to know and be known by others.
These practices help relationships breathe rather than tighten, deepen rather than fracture.

Thank you for reading. If this resonated with you, I’d be honored if you’d forward it to someone who might appreciate it. They can subscribe below:​

Marilyn Gist, PhD