Glass Balls and Rubber Balls
What strong leaders know about what they can afford to drop
It may look like she’s doing it all.
She isn’t.
She’s rotating what she drops.
This is one of the most important things I’ve learned from watching genuinely effective senior leaders operate under sustained pressure — and one of the least discussed. The image of the leader who handles everything, drops nothing, and somehow maintains perfect execution across every domain is not a model of excellence. It’s a myth. And chasing it is exhausting, unsustainable, and ultimately counterproductive.
Strong leaders don’t try to keep every ball in the air. They’ve developed a more sophisticated skill: knowing which balls are glass and which are rubber.
Rubber balls bounce. You can drop them. They’ll come back. Glass balls shatter — and the damage is lasting.
A delayed response, a rescheduled meeting, a report that goes out a day late — these are rubber balls. The consequence of dropping them is real but recoverable.
A key relationship, your team’s trust, a board commitment, your own integrity under pressure — these don’t bounce. Drop them and the damage is lasting.
The leaders who sustain performance over time — not just sprint through a crisis but actually lead with consistency across years — have gotten very clear about which category their current responsibilities fall into. They drop rubber balls deliberately, without guilt, because dropping them is the only way to keep the glass ones safely in hand.
This sounds simple. It is not easy.
It requires letting go of the belief that everything on your list carries equal weight. It requires tolerating the discomfort of imperfection in some areas in order to protect what actually matters. It requires the confidence to make that call without apologizing for it.
It also requires knowing yourself well enough to distinguish between the balls you’re dropping because they’re genuinely rubber — and the ones you’re dropping because they’re hard, or uncomfortable, or because you’ve quietly decided they’re rubber when they aren’t.
That’s the real work. And it’s worth doing deliberately rather than finding out under pressure which of the balls you let fall were glass all along.
I write about leadership, influence, and what it takes to lead at this level on LinkedIn.
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