Demand Management 101: The Hidden Work Executives Generate & How to Eliminate It

Every executive wants a high-performing team. Yet many leaders overlook a critical factor that silently erodes productivity and morale: poor demand management.

Demand management is the practice of intentionally shaping and prioritizing the requests, expectations, and oversight you place on your team to ensure their effort is focused on high-value work rather than low-impact tasks that don't move the needle.

Poor demand management occurs when an organization rewards output over impact and when executives make requests without first determining what is truly needed. The result is a wave of non-value-add work that consumes significant time and energy, but rarely delivers real value. This invisible workload drives burnout, wastes effort, and slows meaningful progress.

Mastering the art of effective demand management is the key to breaking this cycle. By auditing how your requests, priorities, and oversight shape your team’s work, you can eliminate non-value add work, free up capacity, and protect your team’s ability to focus on high-impact analysis and initiatives.

10 Key Drivers That Keep Teams Busy but Not Productive

To stop the drain on your team, you first need to understand where it starts. The following are common drivers of non-value-add work—some unintentionally created by executives, others stemming from a non-optimized organization—that often consume effort without producing meaningful impact. When left unaddressed, these can lead to employee churn, burnout, and wasted effort.

1. Detail-Oriented Culture: Teams focus on analyzing and reporting details that do not impact decision-making, a behavior that often results from a culture that rewards thoroughness over strategic importance.

   
   

2. Custom Data & Reports: Effort is spent on tailoring data and reports to individual executive preferences rather than implementing a standardized reporting package that drives efficiency and alignment across the organization.

   
   

3. Fragmented & Inconsistent Processes: When processes are disconnected or inconsistent across teams and functions, they can create unnecessary coordination, revisions, and delays.

   
   

4. Disjointed & Unclear Timelines: Misaligned or poorly communicated deadlines across teams and functions often create unnecessary downtime, inefficiency, and last-minute fire drills.

   
   

5. "Just in Case" Analysis: Teams spend time preparing analyses and scenarios that rarely influence decisions, often triggered by executives routinely asking questions in meetings out of curiosity rather than necessity.

   
   

6. Vague Instructions, Guidelines, and Expectations: Unclear expectations force teams to over-prepare and iterate repeatedly to meet unknown standards.

   
   

7. Presentation-Heavy Environment: When the culture prioritizes slides, teams create decks even when they are not needed, and focus excessively on formatting.

   
   

8. Undefined Thresholds: Unclear or uncommunicated materiality thresholds lead teams to dig into trivial expenditures and variances, generating analysis that provides little to no value to the organization.

   
   

9. Ad-hoc Requests: Requests made without context, deadlines, guidance on prioritization, or a clear purpose often lead teams to produce analysis that is not used or actionable.

   
   

10. Undefined Feedback Loops: When there is no defined process, teams typically receive informal or unstructured feedback, often resulting in repeated revisions and wasted effort.

How to Spot Waste Before Employee Burnout

The best leaders don’t wait for a resignation letter to realize their team is overwhelmed. They proactively hunt for inefficiencies that live beneath the surface. Use these four diagnostic practices to identify where your team’s energy is being spent on low-value activities:

• Inventory the Deliverables: Ask your team to document all recurring tasks and ad-hoc deliverable requests, along with the time spent on each. Reviewing this inventory will reveal low-value work, redundancies, and opportunities to streamline effort, freeing capacity for high-impact initiatives.

  
  

• Audit Your Own Requests: Step back and rigorously evaluate every request you make, and ask: “What information do I truly need to make this decision?” Stop asking for anything beyond that. Doing so ensures your team spends time on work that drives meaningful outcomes.

• Flag Unnecessary Analysis: Look for instances where your team creates analysis or scenarios that do not influence key decisions. Stopping this behavior reduces wasted effort and keeps focus on value-driven work.

  
  

• Watch for "Re-work" Patterns: Track repeated last-minute requests that force teams to redo or adjust work in progress, as well as requests for multiple versions of the same data set. These patterns often signal time being spent on work that could have been avoided.

By applying these practices, you keep your team focused on high-impact work that drives real results.

The Four Principles of Smarter Demand Management

Sustaining a high-output, value-add environment requires more than asking teams to work harder, it requires discipline in how work is requested and prioritized. Poor demand management quietly drains capacity and accelerates burnout. Apply these four demand management principles to reduce noise and help your team focus on what truly matters:

1. Strategize: Think through what is truly needed, set priorities, and clearly communicate expectations before your team starts work, so they know exactly what to focus on.

   
   

2. Simplify: Eliminate unnecessary detail, focus on materiality and what truly matters, and ask your team to only include information that impacts decisions in analyses, presentations, and reports.

   
   

3. Streamline: Cut redundant reports, reviews, meetings, and iterations, and make processes and workflows as lean as possible.

   
   

4. Standardize: Leverage consistent templates, timelines, and reporting formats to prevent your team from reinventing the wheel for every ask or meeting.

   
   

By applying these four principles, you shift from unintentionally creating non-value add work for your team to managing demand effectively. This should result in a team that spends its energy on high-value, decision-driving work.

Final Thoughts

Leadership isn’t measured by how much work a team produces, but by how much of that work truly matters. When leaders actively manage demand and reduce low-value activity, they reclaim capacity for strategic thinking, better decisions, and innovation—turning effort into impact. Avant Strategy has helped several organizations implement successful demand management strategies and can work with your team to achieve the same results, ensuring your organization focuses on what truly drives value.