The Leader with the Dull Axe

There's an old story about a woodcutter. Day one, he works hard and fells twenty trees. Day two, just as hard, fifteen. Day three, ten. By Friday he's starting earlier, finishing later, and cutting less than ever.

He goes to his boss, confused. "I don't understand it. I'm working harder than I've ever worked." His boss asks him one question. "When did you last stop to sharpen your axe?"

He hadn't. He'd been far too busy cutting.

Most leaders hear that and go quiet for a second. Because they recognise it.

Working harder isn't working better

When results slip, the instinct is to swing harder. Longer hours. More effort. More push. It feels responsible, and it's certainly visible.

But a leader on a blunt blade still works. They just work harder for less. The effort is real. The return on it is quietly shrinking, and nobody can see it happening, including them.

A leader's sharpest tool is their judgment. The calls they make, the patterns they catch early, the things they decide are worth worrying about. Every hard decision runs on it. And judgment goes blunt the same way an axe does: heavy use, no time to maintain it.

That maintenance is thinking. Stepping back. Taking stock. Looking honestly at a decision after the fact. It's the least urgent thing in any week, so it's the first thing a full week drops. Nothing breaks on the day you skip it. It just gets a little harder to lead well, slowly, in a way that's easy to blame on everything else.

Sharpening isn't time off the job. It is the job.

The woodcutter who stops to sharpen isn't slacking. He's doing the most important part of the work. The cutting only counts because the blade is sharp.

Same for leaders. Time to think isn't a reward for clearing the list, and it isn't a nice-to-have for quieter weeks. It's the part of the job that makes the rest of it land. A sharp leader makes better calls in less time, sees trouble sooner, and burns less energy cleaning up avoidable mistakes.

It's why the leaders who guard that time tend to pull ahead, even when the ones beside them are visibly working harder.

You can't sharpen the blade on your own

Here's the hard part. Sharpening your own judgment is genuinely difficult to do alone. The assumptions most worth testing are the ones you can't see, because they feel like plain facts. The patterns worth catching are the ones you're standing inside of.

That's the work coaching is built for. Not advice. Not a model to follow. A confidential hour with someone qualified to help you think, where the only agenda is yours. We're registered psychologists who work with leaders across Aotearoa, so we know how judgment, pressure and habit actually behave. But the thinking stays yours, and so does the sharper judgment you walk out with. It carries to the next hard call, long after the coaching ends.

The question worth asking

The woodcutter's boss asked one question. It's worth asking of the leaders you're responsible for, and of yourself.

When did they last stop to sharpen the axe?

If the honest answer is "not for a while", that isn't weakness, and it isn't bad time management. It's what happens when a demanding role has no time built in for the one thing that keeps the role working. The good news: it's one of the easier things to fix.

Executive coaching with 3 Big Things is that time, built in. Confidential, one-to-one sessions with a registered psychologist, in service of one thing: keeping your leaders' judgment sharp. If a name came to mind while you were reading this, start with a short discovery call. No proposal, no commitment, just an honest conversation about whether it's the right fit.