333: Reclaim Your Time and Lead With Confidence with Jimmy Burroughes

November 9, 2025·41 min·3 clips

Boston Consulting Group found consultants who went home early three times a week consistently outperformed in productivity and client satisfaction.

This episode features host Laura Bernard and guest Jimmy Burrows, a high-performance leadership expert with a background in military service, corporate HR, and operations. They explore how PMO and transformation leaders can escape reactive firefighting to become strategic, impactful leaders. Jimmy introduces the "village fisherman" analogy, describing leaders who constantly solve problems and become organizational bottlenecks. He contrasts this with the "icebreaker leader," who creates psychological safety and removes obstacles for their team. Jimmy references his work with nearly 12,000 leaders, noting about 50% remain stuck in the firefighting trap. He shares a story of a casino hospitality business that lurched from crisis to crisis for over four years, partly because its leadership style thrived on constant emergencies. Jimmy advocates for leaders to reclaim time by auditing their tasks against their hourly rate, avoiding low-value "$5 an hour" work. He details a study with a large American retail business where executives who took 45-minute reflective breaks with a notebook saw superior performance and career potential. A surprising insight is Jimmy's claim that leaders often become "fire starters" by unconsciously allowing problems to escalate so they can swoop in and save the day. He argues that constant crisis mode prevents leaders from spotting future opportunities and navigating safer strategic paths. Jimmy presents a delegation framework called EDIP—Explain, Demonstrate, Imitate, Practice—adapted from military training to effectively hand off tasks. He cites research from Boston Consulting Group showing consultants who left work early multiple times per week significantly outperformed peers in productivity and client satisfaction. The conversation reveals that strategic rest, through "creative habits" like socializing or art, accesses a brain state for processing and problem-solving, leading to major productivity gains. Jimmy asserts that the phrase "I'll just" work late or skip rest is a primary driver of burnout, placing at least 50% of the responsibility for burnout on the individual's choices. The tone is highly conversational and coaching-oriented, blending personal anecdotes with actionable frameworks and research. The style is motivational and direct, with both hosts sharing their own struggles with firefighting to build rapport. This episode is ideal for project, program, and transformation leaders feeling overwhelmed by tactical demands and seeking structured methods to delegate and think strategically. Listeners resistant to the idea that personal work habits significantly contribute to burnout or those seeking highly technical project management advice might find it less relevant.

As heard by us

A practical reset for leaders stuck in firefighting and too many meetings.

PMO Strategies treats a familiar firefighting pattern as a sharper leadership problem: how much time gets drained by work that only seems urgent?

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want to reclaim six plus hours a week and earn a calmer seat at the table.

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