Boundary Work — Hold the Line at Wasatch Analytics

A four-round, intermediate leadership-development simulation set inside Wasatch Analytics Group, a Salt Lake City data-and-advisory firm ($58m revenue, 24% growth, 340 staff) where billable utilisation runs hot at 88% and an internal pulse survey just flagged that 31% of managers report 'always-on' expectations and rising exhaustion, with high-performer voluntary turnover at 17% against an 11% firm average. You play the inner judgement of Priya Raman, a newly promoted Senior Engagement Manager with seven direct reports, a flagship client (NorthPeak Retail) that has just escalated a stalled rollout into a three-week 'war-room' sprint demanding 7am daily stand-ups and 'real-time' responsiveness — and, the same evening, a two-week daycare closure and a partner who says plainly 'I can't absorb another one of these.' Priya has roughly 50 sustainable hours a week against ~70 of apparent demand: a ~20-hour gap that working harder cannot close, only boundary and delegation choices can. Across four rounds you (1) diagnose this as an identity-and-boundary problem rather than a time-management one, locating Priya on Kreiner's integration–segmentation spectrum and naming the identity ('the always-available star') at the root; (2) choose and resource a coherent set of boundary-work tactics across behavioural, temporal, physical and communicative families — closing the demand gap through credible, enforceable limits and real delegation rather than a grab-bag of good intentions; (3) perform identity work to reframe Priya's professional value from constant availability to judgement and outcomes, scripting a response to the skip-level boss's identity-laden 'compliment' and renegotiating the load at home without rejecting either relationship; and (4) sustain through the sprint under a 9pm escalation, distinguish a deliberate bounded exception from uncontrolled erosion, and convert Priya's private boundaries into a durable team norm that protects all seven reports. The math rewards person-fit (designing for Priya's real integration preference), enforceable boundaries, peer-credible identity reframing, bounded flexibility and a team-level norm — and punishes the five classic errors: time-management framing, unenforced boundaries, blunt pushback at the boss, all-or-nothing segmentation that lets the client fail, and a solo fix that ignores the team. Final KPIs track Well-being, Sprint Performance, Boundary Credibility and Team-Norm Health, with the demand-capacity gap as the binding resource.