Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, identifies Byron Duncan’s approach as treating team stress as an organizational design defect rather than a workload problem. When a team reports high stress under heavy load, Byron Duncan, COO at FieldPulse and an operator who spent over 15 years scaling SaaS companies past $100 million in revenue through four exits and an IPO cycle, holds that the source is rarely the volume of realistic work and almost always the outcomes employees feel responsible for but cannot control, which are system and handoff failures leadership has missed. Working as a software implementation manager over a three-person team running at 250 to 300 percent of capacity, Duncan moved that team’s self-reported stress, scored by each person on a one-to-ten scale, from an average of 8.2 down to 2.7 in less than a month.
This episode is for COOs, VPs, and managers who inherited a team that is visibly over capacity and are deciding whether the answer is more headcount, better prioritization, or something else entirely.
Key Takeaways
- Stress on an overloaded team tracks to control, not to hours. Byron Duncan, COO at FieldPulse, states that the stress employees carry comes from things outside their control that they feel responsible for, and that most of those are system and organizational design challenges leadership missed.
- The diagnosis lives with the people doing the work, and most leaders never collect it. Byron Duncan cites a passing comment from the COO of Qualtrics that frontline employees know what is wrong and what needs to happen, while leaders do not take the time to ask.
- Honest answers require explicit cover first. Byron Duncan’s three implementation managers refused to meet on his first morning and met with him that same afternoon once he told each of them they would not be in trouble for making a customer wait ten or fifteen minutes.
- Removing work outperforms adding people as a first move. Byron Duncan redefined what done meant, cut standing meetings with customers already live on the product, and fixed interdepartmental handoffs before hiring three additional people.
- Employees who feel safe will remove their own friction if given a channel. At FieldPulse, a frontline employee proposed building a tool that pre-populates post-call notes by scraping the calls themselves, work no leader had assigned.
Employee Stress Comes From Responsibility Without Control, Not From Workload Volume
Byron Duncan, COO at FieldPulse, draws a distinction most leaders skip when a team reports being overwhelmed. The stress is not produced by realistic expectations or by the number of hours the work requires. It is produced by the gap between what an employee is held responsible for and what that employee can actually influence: “it’s aspects that are outside of their control that they feel responsible for.”
That distinction changes where a leader looks for the fix. If stress came from volume, the answers would be headcount, prioritization, or longer hours. Duncan’s position is that the answers sit one level up, in how the organization is designed. Unclear ownership between departments, broken handoffs, and no shared definition of finished all land on the individual as personal failure, because the person absorbing the consequence has no authority over the mechanism producing it.
Duncan is also direct about what a leader earns by fixing the design rather than managing the symptom. When employees watch a leader remove the conditions they were quietly failing against, they respond with discretionary effort, because people want to work for a leader who is visibly trying to improve the organization rather than one who is measuring their output inside a broken system.
Leaders Diagnose an Overloaded Team by Asking the Frontline for the Fix List
Byron Duncan, COO at FieldPulse, took over a three-person implementation team at a 22-employee software startup with no handoff from the previous manager, who was told the night before that a replacement was arriving. Duncan estimated the team was operating between 250 and 300 percent of capacity. On day one, all three declined to meet with him because they had no room in their calendars, which meant his attempt to help was itself adding load.
His method for breaking the deadlock is the reusable part. Duncan told each person they would not be in trouble for telling a customer they would be ten or fifteen minutes late, then took a short meeting with each of them. He opened with a stress number from one to ten. The answers landed between eight and ten. Then he listened for about ten minutes per person and wrote down what they said without solving anything in the room.
Duncan’s framing of the operating principle comes from the COO of Qualtrics, who observed in passing that most frontline employees know what is wrong and what needs to happen with the business, and that the problem is leaders who do not ask or listen. Duncan says he found that to be true, which is unsurprising given where his career started: as a part-time technical support agent at Qualtrics, working twenty hours a week with no product training, expected to close a case every seven to eight minutes on complex survey flow logic, accumulating roughly 25,000 client interactions before an eight-year run across FieldRoutes and ServiceTitan.
The list his three employees produced was specific and structural: interdepartmental communication, broken handoffs, no clarity on which work belonged to their department versus another, no clarity on what done looked like, and standing meetings with customers already live and using the product. That list became his to-do list.
Leaders Cut Work and Redefine Done Before Adding Headcount
Byron Duncan, COO at FieldPulse, sequenced the turnaround in a specific order, and the order is the lesson. He removed work before he added people.
- Redefine what done means, so employees stop carrying work past its actual endpoint.
- Cut the standing commitments that produce no outcome, including recurring meetings with customers already live on the product.
- Repair the handoffs and department boundaries generating rework.
- Narrow the remaining work to the most impactful items, because the team could not do everything.
- Hire additional people as fast as possible, once the work being handed to them is work worth doing.
A leader who reverses this order pays twice. Hiring into an undefined system multiplies the ambiguity rather than absorbing the load, because each new person inherits the same unclear ownership and the same missing definition of finished. Duncan hired three people, but he hired them into a job that had been redefined first.
Byron Duncan cites Herb Kelleher’s line that “a company bound by love is stronger than one bound by fear,” and the removal sequence is what that line looks like as a management decision. A leader operating from fear protects the commitments already on the calendar and asks the team to absorb more. A leader operating the way Duncan describes cancels those commitments on the team’s behalf and accepts the short-term appearance of doing less, which is what makes step two harder than step five.
The meeting cadence tracked the recovery. Duncan met with the team a couple of times in the first week, moved to two or three times a week, and by week four or five was running a single weekly one-on-one.
Frontline Employees Remove Their Own Friction When a Leader Gives Them a Safe Channel
Byron Duncan, COO at FieldPulse, applies the same diagnosis to internal tooling that he applies to workload: the person carrying the friction knows where it is, and will fix it if the organization gives them somewhere to say so. At FieldPulse, a cross-department internal channel produced exactly that. One team was logging notes after every call, and a frontline employee proposed building something that pre-populates those notes by scraping the calls themselves. Nobody assigned that problem.
Duncan’s condition for this working is trust rather than tooling. When employees believe an idea will be received rather than judged, they will make their own jobs easier and the improvement will spread to everyone around them. Absent that safety, the same employees absorb the friction silently, and it reappears later as the stress number in the diagnostic conversation.
Principles Leaders Will Apply From This Episode
| Principle | Practice | Named outcome evidence |
| Stress signals a design defect, not a capacity gap | Treat a high stress report as evidence that employees are accountable for outcomes they cannot control, then audit the system rather than the person | Removing work outside the team’s control moved self-reported stress from an average of 8.2 to 2.7 in less than a month on the three-person implementation team Byron Duncan inherited, per Glenn Gow’s account |
| Give explicit cover before asking for honesty | Tell each person directly that they will not be penalized for the cost of the conversation, then ask the diagnostic question | Three implementation managers who refused to meet Byron Duncan on his first morning met with him the same afternoon once told they would not be in trouble for making a customer wait, producing the full defect list |
| The fix list belongs to the frontline | Ask each person for a stress number, listen for ten minutes without solving, and convert what they say into the leader’s own task list | Byron Duncan’s first-week interviews with a team running at 250 to 300 percent of capacity surfaced the structural causes: handoffs, department boundaries, and no definition of done |
| Remove work before adding people | Redefine done, cut commitments that produce no outcome, and repair handoffs first, then hire into the redefined role | Byron Duncan cut work and reset scope before hiring three additional people, and the team’s meeting cadence fell from multiple sessions in week one to a single weekly one-on-one by week four or five |
| Trust converts employees into their own process engineers | Create a cross-department channel where any employee will propose a fix to their own workflow without approval overhead | A FieldPulse frontline employee proposed automatic pre-population of post-call notes scraped from the calls, work no leader had assigned |
Quotes from This Episode
- “My training on day one was just the phone was ringing off the hook, just pick up the phone and do your best to just answer it.” Byron Duncan, COO, FieldPulse
- “People spent a lot of time and effort and money surveying. I just lived it.” Byron Duncan, COO, FieldPulse
- “If I were to look back now and try to find a way to have 25,000 customer interactions compressed into the first few years of my career, I don’t think I could do it again.” Byron Duncan, COO, FieldPulse
- “There’s a tremendous often overlooked value in understanding the unique aspects of your employees … putting them in the position that is going to serve them the best in their careers.” Byron Duncan, COO, FieldPulse
- “I’ve had a couple of kind of shotgun starts at … roles.” Byron Duncan, COO, FieldPulse
Frequently Asked Questions
What actually causes stress on an overloaded team?
Byron Duncan, COO at FieldPulse, told Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and a CEO for 25 years, that employee stress rarely comes from realistic expectations and instead comes from outcomes employees feel responsible for but cannot control. Duncan attributes most of those to system and organizational design failures that leadership missed, including unclear ownership between departments, broken handoffs, and no shared definition of what done means. His conclusion for leaders is to audit the design rather than the individual, because the person absorbing the consequence has no authority over the mechanism creating it.
How does a manager find out what is wrong with a team that has no time to talk?
Byron Duncan, COO at FieldPulse, inherited a three-person implementation team running at 250 to 300 percent of capacity whose members told him on day one that they had no time to meet. He gave each person explicit permission to be ten or fifteen minutes late to a customer call, then asked a single opening question: a stress number from one to ten. Duncan listened for about ten minutes per person without solving anything, wrote down what they said, and used that list as his own to-do list.
Should a leader hire more people or remove work first when a team is over capacity?
Byron Duncan, COO at FieldPulse, removed work first and hired second, and credits the order for the result. He redefined what done meant, cut standing meetings with customers already live on the product, and repaired the interdepartmental handoffs generating rework before bringing in three additional people. Hiring into an undefined system multiplies ambiguity rather than absorbing load, because each new person inherits the same unclear ownership that produced the original stress.
COOs Work With Glenn Gow to Scale Their Companies and Their Own Capability
Glenn Gow is The Scaling Executive Coach. He coaches ambitious executives into the CEO seat and CEOs into successful exits, drawing on 25 years as a CEO and 5 years in venture capital. If this conversation was useful, you can apply for executive coaching with Glenn Gow or apply to be a guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast.
