Michelle Gruening: When Curiosity Turns Into Procrastination

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“Any strength taken to the extreme can be a detriment.”

In this episode of the Action Lab Leadership Podcast, Danny sits down with Michelle Gruening, an expert coach at Action Lab Leadership (and his wife!). Together they pull back the curtain on the messy, deeply human side of leadership.

They dive into how well-meaning habits, great intentions, and natural strengths can secretly sabotage your team’s growth and your own progress. If you want to master how to overcome procrastination as a leader, the first step is realizing that your stalling tactics might be hiding behind your favorite traits.

The Protection Paradox: When Shielding Your Team Hurts Them

Many business owners and managers struggle with delegation because they want to protect their staff. Michelle notes that early in her tech career, she held onto massive workloads to avoid burdening her team.

• The Growth Bottleneck: While it feels like you are being helpful and protective, you are actually creating a bottleneck.
• Preventing Resilience: By keeping your team shielded from heavy workloads, tough client interactions, or chaotic shifts, you deny them the chance to learn how to ride the waves and weather the storms.
• Relinquishing Control: True leadership requires moving away from transactional management and leaning into transformational relationships. Plant the trees under whose shade you may never sit.

The Hidden Trap: When Curiosity Shifts into Procrastination

Curiosity is an incredible leadership asset; it helps you lead with questions rather than assumptions. However, it has a dark side.

“We could say, ‘Oh, well, I’m just so curious. I’m going to keep researching for a year before I make a decision.’ That’s no longer curiosity, that’s procrastination.”

Michelle Gruening

When you fall into hyper-fixation rabbit holes (spending months over-analyzing a problem, researching options, or picking up endless hobbies) you aren’t working. You are stalling. You are using information-gathering as a sophisticated shield to avoid taking action.

The Ukulele Lesson: Stop Chasing Goals You Don’t Care About

To illustrate this, Michelle shares a story about a time she hyper-focused on learning the ukulele. She bought the instrument and signed up for monthly lessons because she loved the idea of being a carefree person strumming on a beach.

A month into it, she realized she didn’t actually give a damn about playing the ukulele.

Leaders frequently do this in business. They adopt projects, targets, or business models simply because of how they think it will make them look to the outside world. This creates massive friction. When you build goals around external approval rather than what you genuinely care about, execution becomes painful. And it leads straight back into the procrastination loop.

Taming the Thunder: Delivering Better Critical Feedback

Procrastination also shows up when leaders avoid difficult conversations. Michelle traces her own evolution from a young manager who gave overly blunt, abrasive feedback to a leader who overcompensated by being far too soft.

To overcome the anxiety of feedback:

• Separate Identity from Behavior: Shift from “You are this way” to “I noticed you did this action, how can we solve it together?”
• Avoid the Whiplash: Don’t swing erratically between aggression and passivity. Make small, intentional adjustments to your phrasing over time based on the specific communication style of your employee.

We deep dive this topic in our leadership training program. If you want your team to deliver critical feedback without crushing morale, we can help!

How to Stop Stalling: Keep Your Promises to Yourself

When figuring out how to overcome procrastination as a leader, we must recognize that we usually stall on the projects that only affect us. We will move mountains to avoid letting down a client or a team member, but we will continuously push our own goals to the bottom of the pile.

The ultimate solution to break this cycle? Keep the promises you make to yourself.

Every time you break a promise to yourself and put it off until later, your self-confidence takes a hit. Treat a commitment to yourself with the exact same gravity as a commitment to your biggest client. Share your goals out loud for external accountability, make the first step smaller, and take a single action to put the promise into motion today.