Your Job Has Executive-Function Demands Too
Why a promotion, growth, or changing role can make work feel harder even when your capability has not changed.
A promotion can produce a strange experience. You know more than you did a few years ago. You have better judgment, more experience and a stronger understanding of the work. Yet the new role can leave you feeling less organized, more mentally stretched and surprisingly inconsistent at things you thought you had already mastered.
It is easy to interpret this as a problem with your capability. After all, greater experience is supposed to make work easier. In some ways it does. You recognize patterns faster, know which problems deserve attention and have a much larger library of experience to draw from.
The work itself may also have changed in ways that are less obvious.
We usually describe a job by its responsibilities. A leader manages a team, makes decisions, oversees projects, solves problems and delivers results. Underneath those visible responsibilities is another layer of work. Someone has to decide what deserves attention, keep relevant information available, shift when circumstances change, resist distractions, monitor progress and notice when the original plan needs to be reconsidered.
That layer is easy to miss because organizations rarely describe jobs in terms of their executive-function demands. Job descriptions are considerably more likely to mention “strategic leadership” than “must repeatedly reconstruct train of thought after someone asks a quick question.”
Yet those demands are present in every working day, and they can change substantially as responsibility grows.
The same professional can be doing very different cognitive work
Imagine a manager leading a small, experienced team in a relatively stable part of a business. The work may be complex, but much of its structure is established. People understand their responsibilities, the manager knows where information lives, and many recurring problems have familiar solutions. There is enough predictability to plan ahead and enough continuity to stay with difficult work for a reasonable amount of time.
Now imagine that same manager after the organization begins growing quickly. New employees arrive. Responsibilities are being redistributed. Decisions that once affected five people now affect twenty. Information changes faster, and the manager is pulled into problems that did not exist six months ago.
The person’s professional knowledge has not disappeared. What has changed is the cognitive work required to use it.
More information has to remain active while new information arrives. Plans need revision before they are completed. Attention shifts more often because several issues may require action at the same time. Decisions have to be made while parts of the situation are still unclear. The manager also has to keep track of what has been decided so that today’s solution does not quietly create next week’s problem.
Executive functions are involved throughout that work. Working memory helps us hold and use information while doing something with it. Cognitive flexibility helps us adjust when circumstances change. Planning and prioritization help us organize action when several possibilities compete for attention. Metacognition helps us monitor what we are doing and recognize when our approach needs to change.
Different work places different weight on those processes.
That gives us a useful way to understand why the same person can function very differently across two roles without reducing the explanation to competence, motivation or effort.
Jobs have cognitive demands as well as technical demands
We already accept this idea in other areas of work. A job may require physical stamina, technical expertise, emotional labor or a particular level of interpersonal skill. We understand that the work places demands on the person doing it.
Executive-function demands are less visible.
Consider two days that contain roughly the same number of working hours. During the first, you spend three uninterrupted hours developing a strategy, have lunch, meet with your team and finish the afternoon reviewing a proposal. The work may be difficult, but there is continuity within it.
The second day is fragmented. You begin the strategy work, stop for a meeting, return for twenty minutes, answer an urgent request, attend another meeting and then discover that a decision is waiting for you before someone else can proceed. By the time you return to the strategy work, you have to reconstruct where you were and what you were thinking.
The calendar will happily report that both days contained eight hours because the calendar is not burdened by nuance.
The number of hours tells us very little about the cognitive difference between those days.
The second day repeatedly asks you to disengage from one mental context and enter another. Each return requires some reconstruction. You have to retrieve the relevant information, remember what you had already considered and work out what comes next.
Five meetings therefore create more cognitive work than the five blocks visible on the calendar.
This is one reason people can look at a relatively ordinary day and wonder why they are so mentally tired. The visible workload does not capture all the work their brain was doing.
Responsibility changes the demand profile of work
Professional growth often changes executive-function demands because responsibility changes what the person has to determine for themselves.
Earlier in a career, more of the structure may come from outside you. Someone else has already decided what needs to be done, when it is due and what a successful result looks like. You still need executive functions to carry out the work, but some of the planning and prioritization has already happened.
As responsibility increases, more of those decisions move toward you.
A senior leader may receive a problem with no clear instructions because deciding what the problem requires is part of the job. Several priorities may all be legitimate, which means prioritization involves judgment rather than simply following an established order. A decision may have to be made before all the information is available, while the leader keeps enough of the wider context in mind to understand what the decision could affect.
There is an odd reward built into professional competence. Becoming very good at solving difficult problems often leads to being given problems that arrive with considerably less structure.
Congratulations on your expertise! Here is some ambiguity.
That can feel like a change in your ability when you are actually encountering a change in what the work requires you to supply.
This becomes particularly visible after promotion. Someone may have been outstanding in a role where priorities were relatively clear and long periods of concentration were possible. Their new position may involve constant switching, ambiguous decisions and responsibility for work that remains unfinished across weeks or months.
The knowledge that earned the promotion remains valuable. The new role simply asks for more than knowledge.
A business can outgrow the way its founder has been working
Founders often experience the same change without receiving a new title.
In the early stages of a business, a great deal can be managed through proximity. The founder knows the clients, remembers the important conversations and is involved in most significant decisions. Information does not have far to travel because the person who needs it may have been in the room when it was created.
Growth changes that arrangement gradually enough that the cognitive shift can be hard to see.
More people means more information is generated outside the founder’s direct view. Decisions begin affecting work they are no longer personally doing. Commitments that once could be remembered through familiarity now have to survive across people, projects and time. The founder has to maintain a broader picture of the business while becoming less involved in many of its individual parts
At some point, keeping the business in your head stops being an impressive party trick and starts becoming a very unreliable information system.
The founder may experience this first as personal inconsistency. They forget something they would once have remembered. A decision gets delayed. A commitment disappears until somebody asks about it. The natural response is often to try harder to stay on top of everything.
But the growing role is now asking something different of them. The founder has to monitor more without direct involvement, plan across longer time periods and make decisions using information gathered from other people.
The cognitive requirements of running the business have changed along with the business itself.
Trying harder at the old way of working may therefore miss what has actually happened. The person has not necessarily become less capable. The environment in which their capability has to operate has changed.
Difficulty depends partly on what the work repeatedly asks of you
People also differ in how effortful particular executive demands feel.
Someone may be excellent at sustained, complex thinking and find rapid switching exhausting. Another person may respond quickly to changing situations while finding long-range planning much harder to maintain. A professional can solve sophisticated problems and still struggle to keep small commitments visible once several other demands arrive.
This is why broad judgments such as “good executive functioning” are not especially useful for understanding work. Executive function includes several processes, and real jobs call on them in different combinations.
The pattern also changes across time. A role that once involved substantial focused work may become increasingly interruption-heavy as a team grows. A reorganization may suddenly require much more coordination. The departure of an experienced colleague may leave someone carrying decisions that used to be handled elsewhere.
When people say, “I used to be able to do this,” the history matters.
What did this look like when they were doing it successfully? Perhaps the work had more structure. Perhaps interruptions were less frequent. Perhaps fewer decisions were competing for attention, or information that now has to be actively monitored used to arrive naturally through direct involvement.
The job title may not have changed at all.
The cognitive job may have changed considerably.
This gives us another way to look at work
We are accustomed to asking whether someone has the knowledge and skills required for a role. Those remain important. Executive-function demands, however, add another layer of understanding by helping us examine what the work repeatedly requires a person to do with that knowledge.
A role may require frequent switching between unrelated issues. Another may depend heavily on maintaining attention over long periods. Some work requires the person to create structure from ambiguity, while other work places greater weight on remembering future commitments as immediate demands continue to arrive.
This is a way of examining work, not a system for assigning people to jobs. Executive-function demands cannot tell us whether someone should be promoted, whether they will succeed as a leader or whether a particular role is right for them. Human performance is far too dependent on experience, context, support, learning and the conditions around the work for that kind of conclusion.
The value is more practical. When work becomes unexpectedly difficult, we have something more precise to examine than the person’s effort or the size of their workload.
We can look at what their role is repeatedly asking their mind to do.
That can make an important change visible. A person may still be doing work well within their professional capability while spending far more of the day planning from ambiguity, shifting between competing demands, keeping unfinished work active or monitoring information that used to be much easier to access.
Understanding the executive-function demands of a job gives us a more full picture of the job itself. It helps explain why increased responsibility can feel cognitively different long before someone has words for what changed.
Sometimes you didn’t become worse at your job.
Your job became cognitively different.
