There’s a particular kind of busy that has settled over organizations in the last two years. It’s not the productive, energizing kind. It’s the kind where your calendar is full, but your thinking feels shallow; where your team is executing but no one’s quite sure if they’re executing on the right things; and where you’ve added “learn AI” to your to-do list six times and it keeps getting pushed.
If that sounds familiar, you’re not behind, you’re normal. But summer offers something rare: a natural permission structure to pause.
Most senior leaders I work with don’t lack ambition or capability. What they lack is unscheduled time to think. Summer, with its lighter meeting loads, vacations, and slower institutional rhythms, is one of the few seasons where that time is actually available. The question is whether you’ll use it deliberately.
The Honest Mid-Year Check-In
January goals have a funny way of aging. Some become irrelevant. Some were overtaken by events. Some were the right goals but the wrong metrics. And some, if you’re honest, were never really yours to begin with.
A genuine mid-year review isn’t a performance exercise. It’s a leadership one. It asks: What did I set out to do, and does it still matter? Not “Am I on track,” but “Should I be on this track at all?”
In an environment where AI is reshaping entire functions, where org structures are shifting faster than job descriptions can keep up, and where the definition of “high performance” is genuinely in flux, the goals you set in January may have been written for a context that no longer exists.
Give yourself two hours, not a meeting, not a working lunch but time to sit with three questions:
1. What progress am I proud of that I haven’t acknowledged? Leaders at your level are often better at cataloguing gaps than gains.
2. What am I still carrying that I should put down? This includes initiatives that have lost organizational will, commitments made under different circumstances, and projects where you’re the bottleneck for reasons that no longer make sense.
3. Where did my assumptions prove wrong, and what do I need to update? This is the strategic question most senior leaders skip. Updating your mental model mid-year is not an admission of failure. It’s the whole point of leadership.
The AI Disruption Is Real and It’s Not Going Away
Let’s name what’s actually in the room.
AI is not a productivity tool you can learn in an afternoon webinar and then carry on. It is a structural shift in how knowledge work gets done. For many of your teams, it has already changed what good looks like and is about to change it again.
The leaders I’m seeing struggle most right now are not the ones who don’t understand AI. They’re the ones carrying an impossible cognitive load: maintaining yesterday’s workload while trying to absorb and lead through a technology shift that has no clear endpoint. That combination of overload plus uncertainty plus the pressure to have answers, is exhausting in a specific and underacknowledged way.
A few things worth reflecting on before September:
What is your team actually absorbing right now? Not what’s on their job descriptions, but what’s on their plates. Capability and capacity are different problems. A team can have the skills to do something and still not have the bandwidth. Summer is a good moment to reset what’s in flight and what can wait.
What do you need to understand better? You don’t need to become a technical expert, but you do need enough fluency to ask good questions, to push back when something doesn’t sound right, and to lead with credibility on the decisions that are coming. Where is your actual gap and what’s
a realistic way to close it before Q4?
Where is AI creating noise in your organization that looks like a signal? Speed has increased. Not all of it is good work. Some leaders are discovering that AI has accelerated the production of plausible-sounding mediocrity. The editing and judgment layers matter more than ever and they still require humans.
Your Team Deserves Your Attention Right Now
I want to say this carefully, because I know the pull toward getting through your own work is strong: the people on your team are not fine.
They are navigating real ambiguity about their roles, their relevance, and what’s being asked of them. Many are doing more work with the same or fewer people. The social fabric of teams — which took years to build and two years of hybrid work to strain — hasn’t fully recovered. And they’re watching how you engage with all of this and drawing their own conclusions.
Summer is an opportunity to invest in that fabric before the fall push. Not through a team-building event. Not through a mandatory training. Through conversations —real ones, where you’re genuinely curious rather than running an agenda.
Where are they finding meaning in their work right now? What are they most uncertain about? What would help them do their best work in the next six months? If you haven’t had that conversation with your direct reports in the last quarter, you don’t actually know the answer.
The Investment You Keep Deferring
And then there’s you.
Most senior leaders I work with are genuinely good at developing others but neglectful of their own development. Not because they don’t value it, but because self-investment feels discretionary in a way that other priorities don’t.
It isn’t.
If you’re going to lead through the next two years with any degree of steadiness and discernment, you need to be thinking clearly and that requires some form of renewal. What that looks like is different for everyone. For some it’s reading, travel, or time in nature. For others it’s reconnecting with a mentor, a peer group, or a coach. For others it’s the specific kind of recovery that only comes from genuinely unplugging.
Whatever it is for you: it’s not a reward for completing everything else. It’s a prerequisite for doing any of it well.
A Simple Framework for the Next Six Weeks
If you want to use this summer deliberately, here’s where to start:
One strategic conversation with yourself. Block time in the next two weeks for the three questions above. Write, don’t just think.
One conversation per direct report. Not a check-in. A real conversation about their work, their energy, and what would help them most right now.
One thing to stop. Find one initiative, commitment, or meeting that made sense at some point and no longer does. Remove it.
One thing for you. Not optimized, not productive. but genuinely restorative.
September will come quickly. You can either be the leader who spent summer making room and thinking clearly or the one who ran hard through August and arrived at Q4 already depleted.
The pause is available. The question is whether you’ll take it.
If you’re a senior leader considering executive coaching as an investment in your own professional development, feel free to reach out and let’s have conversation.