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You're Not Under-Resourced. You're Over-Extracting.

Writer: Eric Jones
Eric Jones
4 days ago
2 min read

Leaders often diagnose growth problems as resourcing problems.

Add headcount. Increase the budget. Buy another tool. Push the team harder.

But sometimes the system is not under-resourced. It is over-extracted.

You are pulling maximum value from people, partners, and relationships until the ecosystem itself runs dry.

Thomas Eckschmidt made the reframe clearly in Authentic Living S3 E25: “Return on Relationship is what nature does best.”

Nature does not grow by exhausting the soil. It grows through exchange.

Notice

Extraction often hides behind reasonable business language: efficiency, urgency, performance, scale.

Look for the signs:

  • Your strongest people are carrying the heaviest emotional load.

  • Meetings produce compliance but not honest perspective.

  • Customers, partners, or employees feel useful, but not valued.

  • Every solution asks for more effort before restoring capacity.

KPMG’s May 2026 research found that employees with close personal friends at work are the most engaged group: 49% say they are “always engaged,” 78% say their manager cares about them as a person, and 87% focus on skill development.

Yet 42% are very likely to search for a new job within 12 months.

Connection can increase performance while masking depletion.

3D clayart illustration contrasting an exhausted dry patch with a flourishing connected garden

Restore

The answer is not fewer expectations. It is healthier exchange.

  • Ask, “What are we creating together?” instead of “What can we get from them?”

  • Build reserves before expansion: time, trust, cash, attention, and energy.

  • Invite stakeholders into difficult decisions rather than presenting them with finished demands.

  • Protect the hidden transition phase, the caterpillar phase, where the system slows down, strengthens its roots, and prepares to change.

This is the shift from ego to eco.

Thomas noted that organizations applying conscious business principles can achieve financial results up to seven times above market averages over 15–20 years. That is not a quarterly trick. It is the result of relationships compounding over time.

Measure

Gallup’s 2026 data makes the leadership responsibility plain. U.S. engagement sat at 31% in the first half of the year. Where managers actively supported their teams’ AI use, engagement reached 48%, compared with 30% where they did not.

Globally, engagement was only 20%, with manager engagement down to 22% and roughly $10 trillion in lost productivity.

Measure both:

  • Key performance indicators: results, revenue, delivery, quality.

  • Key purpose indicators: belonging, trust, development, wellbeing, and meaningful contribution.

One without the other creates distortion.

Heartbeat Check: Connection

Before asking your team for more, ask:

  • Who feels seen here?

  • Where is trust thinning?

  • Which relationship needs investment before the next target?

Invest in the relationship → ROR rises → ROI follows.

That is the premise behind ROR: Return on Relationship: results become more sustainable when people are treated as part of the living system, not as fuel for it.

Sources

Reflect:

  • Where might your organization be over-extracting while calling it growth?

  • What relationship could you strengthen today before asking anyone to deliver more?

 
 
 

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© 2035 by Roxanne Dehodge.

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