Welcome to part 2 written by Coach JoyGenea with assistance from Claude AI, image by ChatGPT
In Part 1, I told you about the day I drove to the DMV and back twice because I could not put the task down. The motorcycle title. The missing engine number. The two hours that should not have cost me anything near what they cost me. https://joygenea.com/the-close-loop-hostage-effect-part-1/
That was the personal version of the Close Loop Hostage Effect™.
This is the leadership version. And the price is significantly higher.
When the Hostage Loop Runs a Conversation
A leader I know, I will call him Shawn, had been managing a performance issue with a direct report for the better part of two months. The conversation was overdue. He finally cleared his afternoon, prepared his notes, and sat down across from his ops director.
His ops director had left the performance data on his other laptop.
The meeting got pushed two days.
What happened in those two days is the part nobody talks about.
Shawn did not simply reschedule and move on. The loop stayed open. It kept running in the background of every meeting he sat in, every decision he made, every conversation he had with the rest of his team. He was physically present for all of it. Mentally, he was still sitting across from his ops director, running the conversation he had prepared and not gotten to deliver.
The meeting that happened two days later was not the same meeting he had built. The momentum was gone. The precision was gone. His ops director did not receive the clarity he needed at the moment it would have had the most impact.
Shawn spent two days of leadership capacity on a loop that should have lasted ninety minutes.
That is not a scheduling problem. That is the Close Loop Hostage Effect™ operating at the leadership level, and it looks like dozens of other things from the outside. Distraction. Inflexibility. Being hard to reach. Not following through. None of those labels are accurate. None of them point to the actual mechanism.
When the Hostage Loop Runs a Company
This week I worked with a client who is managing thirty active priorities inside their company. Thirty. Vendors, team performance issues, a product launch, client relationships, a hiring decision that has been sitting in limbo for six weeks. Thirty things that all have a pulse and all require attention.
They came to our session and talked about one thing.
One project. One specific issue on one project that had been consuming their attention for three weeks. Every session, this project. Every decision, filtered through this project. Every week, more time and more focus pulled toward this one thing.
Meanwhile, the other twenty-nine were starting to drop.
Not dramatically. Not in ways that were visible yet. But quietly, the way things drop when a leader stops watching them. Vendor relationships going slightly cold. A team member making decisions they should not be making alone because no one was available to weigh in. A hiring decision drifting further into limbo while the company kept running short-handed.
I made a call that surprised my client.
I took the project away.
Not permanently. For one week. I handed it to another employee with strict instructions that my client was not to have access, was not to consult, and was not to receive updates. Complete removal from the loop for seven days.
My client’s first reaction was resistance. Real resistance. Not frustration at the inconvenience but the specific kind of resistance that comes from a brain that has decided this loop is nuclear and that releasing it means losing it entirely.
That reaction told me everything I needed to know.
The project was important. But it was not more important than the twenty-nine other things quietly deteriorating while their leader was being held hostage by one unfinished thing.
This is what the Close Loop Hostage Effect™ does at scale. It does not just cost you the afternoon. It reorganizes your entire leadership priority structure around the one thing your brain refuses to release. Everything else pays the price. And you are the last person in the room to know why.
That is when they start to talk about you behind your back trying to make sense of what is happening. They now have an open loop going on, “what is going on with you?”
What It Is Actually Stealing From You
Let me name the costs specifically, because this is where most leaders stop counting too soon.
It steals your strategic attention.
The ability to hold multiple priorities in view simultaneously and make clear decisions about which one deserves your focus right now is one of the most valuable capacities you bring to your role. The Close Loop Hostage Effect™ takes that offline and redirects it entirely to the open loop. You are not choosing to hyperfocus on one thing. Your brain is choosing for you, and it is choosing based on fear, not strategy.
It steals your delegation capacity.
Handing a task to someone else requires trusting that it will still exist, intact and moving, when you need it. A brain running the Close Loop Hostage Effect™ does not extend that trust easily. It holds on. It checks in too often. It quietly takes the task back. Not because you do not trust your team. Because your brain cannot afford the risk of the loop going silent.
It steals your presence.
Your team is talking to you and you are running a background process they cannot see. The decision that felt slightly off, the feedback that was less precise than you intended, the follow-through you meant to complete and did not, those are not failures of character or commitment. They are the cost of leadership capacity being redirected somewhere your team cannot see and you cannot explain.
It steals your relationships.
The people who work closest to you are not consistently getting the version of you that exists when the loop is closed. They are getting the version that is managing a hostage situation underneath every conversation. And over time, they feel the distance even when they cannot name the cause.
The Cascade
Here is what compounds all of it.
One open loop consumes capacity. Reduced capacity means other things start dropping. Dropped things create new open loops. New open loops increase the demand on a system already running at its limit. The leader works harder to compensate. Exhaustion builds. The loops multiply. And at no point does anyone in the room, including the leader, connect the original pattern to what has now become a full organizational problem.
My client did not need a better productivity system. They did not need a new approach to project management or a different calendar structure. They needed the loop broken by someone standing outside of it, because from inside the loop, the project looked like the most important thing in the room.
It always does. That is the point.
Where We Are in This Series
In Part 1, I asked you to recognize the pattern. To notice the moments when one unfinished thing, or one upcoming event, puts everything else on your list on hold.
Part 2 is asking you to count the cost accurately. Not the two hours. The strategic attention. The delegation that did not happen. The conversation that was slightly less sharp than it should have been. The twenty-nine things that got a little quieter while one loop ran loud.
In Part 3, we are going to talk about what it looks like to work with this pattern instead of around it. Not manage it. Not white-knuckle through it. Not hand every important project to another employee for a week, though sometimes that is genuinely the right call.
We are going to talk about building a brain-based approach to the signal. Because that is what the Close Loop Hostage Effect™ is, underneath everything else. A signal. And once you know what it is actually telling you, you can start making different choices about what to do next.
You Already Know This Is Costing You
You have known it for a long time, even without the name for it.
The question is no longer whether the pattern is real. You are past that. The question is what you are willing to do now that you can see it clearly and count what it is actually taking.
If you are ready to stop managing the hostage situation and start understanding the operating system running underneath it, let us have that conversation.
Schedule your free coaching session at joygenea.com/schedule-free/
Coach JoyGenea
Video Transcription:
The closed loop effect, part two. What is it actually costing you to have this going on in your system? In part one of the series, I told you about the day I drove to the DMV twice in one afternoon because my brain refused to put the task down. That was my personal version of the closed- closed loop hostage effect.
Today, I’m gonna talk about the leadership version because that’s what really matters to you, and I know that, and I’m going to warn you now, the cost is significantly higher than you think. Hey, I’m Coach JoyGenea. I work with high-performing leaders and founders who are unconventional and different thinkers.
People who have built something very real, who are carrying more responsibility than most people will ever understand, and who are quietly paying a tax on a pattern they have never been able to name until now. This is part two of a three-part series on the closed loop hostage effect. If you have not watched part one yet, I’m gonna put the link below.
I want you to go watch it first because what we are building today sits on top of what I explained there. If you have watched part one, awesome. You already know the mechanism. You know what it feels like when your bl- brain flags an important task as nuclear and refuses to release it until the loop is closed.
You know the fear underneath it. You know the cost of your personal time and energy. What you may not have fully connected yet is what it costs you as a leader. That is what we’re gonna do today. Here’s a fabulous situation I’m gonna share with you. I wanna tell you about a leader I know. I’m gonna call him Sean because, well, I would never give you his name.
Sean had been managing, um, a performance issue with a direct report for better part of two months. This was consuming, trust me, a lot of his time and thought, and he, he was ready. The conversations were overdue. He knew it. He finally… He w- he did what he needed to do. He cleared his afternoon. He prepared his notes.
He sat down across from his ops director and got ready to have that conversation. Like, he was there, game on. His ops director left the performance data that they needed to have to have part of the conversation on a different laptop, which happened to be at home. The meeting got pushed two days- And he got stuck.
Here’s the part nobody names. Sean didn’t… He, he ne- he rescheduled it, but his brain did not move on. He had worked so hard to get himself emotionally ready, confident, in that place to have this tough conversation, that when it got paused, he was literally terrified. He called me and he’s like, “If I don’t have this conversation, I’m going to blow, because I’m ready, and I’m afraid I cannot pick up this energy again.”
He wasn’t wrong. The meeting did finally happen two days later. It was not the same meeting that he had built up for. The momentum was gone. He wasn’t wrong. The precision was gone. The ops director did not receive the clarity. He, he was not clear. So unfortunately, they then had to put that person on a PIP, and now it’s gonna take even longer, ’cause he couldn’t quite get that clarity.
So he spent two days of his leadership capacity in this loop instead of being able to close that loop and have that conversation. From the outside, this is the part people forget, from the outside, that looks like distraction, inflexibility, being hard to reach, not following through. None of these labels are actually accurate.
None of them point to the actual mechanism, and none of them help Sean understand what’s actually happening underneath his own operating system. That is the closed loop effect, hostage effect, the leadership level. S- Sean’s story is just a small version. Let me expand it to a whole company. This literally happened this week.
I was talking to a client. He’s managing basically 30 active priorities inside his company. Pretty typical for a lot of my clients. 30 vendors, team performance issues, a product launch, client relationships, a hiring decision that he’s been sitting in limbo for six weeks. 30 things that all have a pulse and all require his attention They came, then he came to my session, and he talked about one thing, one project, one specific issue on the project that he had been consumed by, his full attention for three weeks straight.
I’d been hearing it in every session. This was week three. “Okay, so I got it to this part, and I just… It… And then… And I just…” And he’s… I got it. I get it. I do it myself at times. He was hostage to closing the loop. What was dropping in the meantime were the 29 other things that were still waiting to be moved.
Not dramatically, not in ways that were visible yet to everybody, but quietly. Kinda like quiet quitting, the way things slowly drop, and leaders stop watching them. Vendor relationships get a little cold. Leader… You know, a team meeting, making decisions, nah. They’re kinda doing some of them on their own, and they’re not great, and he’s not weighing in, and I can tell.
And that hire, that’s drifting further and further away. It might not even happen at this point
I’ll be honest, and this totally surprised my client, in that moment, I actually took away the project. I said, “You’re done. I know who this needs to go to in your company. Not permanently, for at least the next week, this employee’s going to work on this prod- product, project. You can’t talk to them about it.
They can’t talk to you about it. There will be no updates about it. You are completely removed.” He had become Almost addicted. That loop was so intense, I had to take it away. Do not think he did not fight me. Do not think he did not call me names. Do not think that we did not deeply need to discuss this further for him to recognize that he had 29 other things that he needed to spend a week now cleaning up and moving forward.
And he, it… He’s already sent me a text and thanked me for being so direct, because he was just wanting to close that loop. That is what the closed loop hostage effect does at scale. Does not just cost the afternoon, it reorganizes your entire leadership priority structure around one thing. Your brain refuses to release and you may not even realize it.
Actually, most of the time you don’t realize it. Everything else pays the price. You are the last person in the room to know why, honestly. So here’s the part that hits hard. This is when they start to talk about you behind your back, actually, trying to make sense of what’s happening. “Well, I gave him this thing, but I’m not hearing back from him.”
You know, “I did this, I did that. What is going on with them?” That loop is running within your staff. What is that costing you? Let’s start to put some numbers on that time and energy that they’re spending trying to figure out if you’re okay, if everything’s going fine. If something… Oh, by the way, employees will then go, if they start to worry, “Oh no, is the company okay?
Oh no, is my job okay?” None of this you want them to even be thinking about. You want them to be focused on your business and helping you out. This is the cost of the closed loop effect. It takes you offline. It redirects your strategic a- attention entirely to this open loop. You’re not choosing to hyper-focus on just one thing.
Your brain is choosing for you, and it is choosing based on fear, not strategy. And you work much better on strategy, and I know it. The second thing it steals is your delegation capacity. Oh, I see it every time. I see it in myself. I see it in my clients. Handing a task to somebody else requires trusting that it will still exist intact and moving when you need it.
A brain running in a closed loop hostage effect does not extend the trust easily. It holds on, right? It checks in too often. “How’s it going? How’s it going? How’s it going?” It quietly takes the task back, right? “I’ll just do this little part.” Without fully realizing it, it has done that. Not because you do not trust your team, you do, because your brain cannot afford the risk of the loop going silent.
I want you to think about how many tasks you’ve taken back from someone in the last 30 days. How many times you stepped back in when you had already handed something off That is the closed loop hostage effect compromising your delegation capacity, and your team feels it even when they do not have the words for it.
I’m giving you the words for it. The third thing it steals is your presence. Your team is talking to you, and you are running a background process they cannot even see. The decision that felt slightly off, the feedback that was less than precise than you intended, the follow-through you meant to complete and did not, those are not failures of character or commitment.
They are the cost of leadership capacity being redirected somewhere your team cannot see and cannot explain. And the fourth thing it steals is in your relationships. The people who are closest to you are not consistently getting the version of you that exists when the loop is closed. They are getting the version that is managing a hostage situation underneath every conversation.
You are only part there, and I will call it out every time. Over time, they feel that distance even when they cannot name the co- They are thinking it, they’re feeling it, but they, they’re, they don’t have a name for it. And some of them stop trying to reach the version of you they know is there. By the way, that’s the time you have a problem.
That person is probably leaving soon. They’ve lost their connection to why. That’s a whole different podca– That’s a whole different conversation. Now, this can also compound. One open loop consumes capacity, reduces capabilities. It means other things start dropping. Dropping things creates new open loops.
New open loops increases the demand on a system that is already running at its limit. So you work harder to compensate, exhaustion builds, the loops multiply, and at no point does anyone in the room, including you, connect the original pattern to what is now becoming a full organizational problem. My client did not need a better productivity system.
Trust me, they did not need a new approach to project management or a different calendar structure. By the way, calendars, this person hates. They needed the loop broken by somebody standing outside of it because inside the loop, the one project looked like the most important thing in the room. It always does.
That is exactly the point. So in part one, I asked you to recognize the pattern. Now in part two, I’m asking you to count the cost accurately, not the two hours, the strategic attention, the delegation that did not happen, the conversation that was slightly less sharp than it should have been, the twenty-nine things that got a little quieter while one loop ran loud, and the team that is now carrying their own open loop about you.
In part three, you’re excited, right? Part three, we’re gonna talk about what it looks like to work with this pattern instead of work around it. We’re gonna go right into it, not manage it, not white-knuckle it. That’s never good or great approach. Not hand every important project over to employees for a week, though, I wanna be clear, sometimes it is genuinely the right call.
I’m going to talk about building a brain-based approach to the signal, because that is what the closed loop hostage effect is underneath everything else. It’s a signal, and once you understand that it is actually telling you something, you can start making different decisions about what you do next. You already know this is costing you.
You have known it for a long time, even without it being named. The question is no longer whether the pattern is real. You are past that. The question is, what are you willing to do now that you can see it clearly and count it as actually taking place? You’re ready to stop managing the hostage situation and start understanding the operating system underneath it.
Let us have that conversation. There’s a link to schedule a free coaching session right now below this video. Go find it, and if you are not there yet, that’s fine. Subscribe and catch part three when it drops, because that is where the work begins. I’m Coach JoyGenea, unconventional leadership coach and international neurodiversity coach, and I look so forward to seeing you in part three.
Bye now.