The Real Reason Your Team Moves So Slowly

Episode #408 The Real Reason Your Team Moves So Slowly

STAGNATION IS A LEADERSHIP PROBLEM

The best teams have a relentless drive to get things done: a bias for action that cuts through everything they do. A team that has momentum feels entirely different, and once you’ve been on a team like that, everything else is going to feel second rate.

The problem is, despite all the posturing and empty claims, most leaders never truly create momentum in their teams.

This isn’t because they lack talent… or even ambition. It’s because the systems, the culture, and the habits they’ve built actively work to slow things down.

Like many things in business, that’s a leadership problem, pure and simple. Momentum doesn’t build itself. It has to be deliberately created, protected, and sustained by the person at the top.

In this newsletter, I break down why speed is so critical to performance; I identify the seven biggest killers of momentum; and I leave you with three moves that you can make (starting right now) to build genuine pace into your team’s culture.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SLOW AND FAST TEAMS

Momentum is a core characteristic of any high-performing team. When you have momentum in your culture, you’ll notice it operates with a completely different energy: everything has an underlying sense of urgency, and your people are always looking for ways to do things better, faster, and cheaper.

I’ve worked in fast teams and, trust me, I’ve worked in slow teams.

If I were to describe the underlying drivers of momentum, it really comes down to two things:

1. The expectations the leader sets; and
2. The speed of decision making.

Neither of those is easy to change.

1. Expectations.

I’ve worked in companies that move at glacial speed, and a key lever that I was able to pull to turn around the performance of those businesses was simply lifting the tempo.

But organisations like that are conditioned to protect themselves from change. So, making the change to increase momentum requires relentless commitment. If you succumb to the status quo, it’s impossible to improve performance in any meaningful way.

If you genuinely want to move faster, you’ve got to make some decisive moves that signal a change in your expectations: what might have been good enough yesterday simply isn’t good enough tomorrow.

But you can’t just say “go faster”. You’ve got to show your people how to go faster. When it comes to this, a couple of key things come to mind:

The first is you have to remove the clutter. By this, I mean getting rid of any low-value activity. This is easier said than done, because people often become emotionally attached to their work. But if you have a relentless focus on value, you’ve got a pretty good chance of stripping away some of the noise.

The second thing that occurs to me is you have to change people’s paradigm of what good looks like. Sometimes it’s just hard to verbalise what needs to be different. It’s infinitely easier to bring someone in from the outside who already gets what you’re talking about.

So instead of just harping on and being met with blank stares, show your people what good looks like: a person who you know is going to role model the culture you want.

Just be a little bit careful not to do what I once did. I brought someone in from outside and said to the team, “Now this is how you do it“… only to watch my new hire perform worse than the leader he replaced.

It was like a slow motion train crash, and no one enjoyed it.

2. Decision-making speed.

This is something that I was able to master gradually over a 20-year period. It’s not easy to get the right balance between information gathering, governance processes, collaboration, and speed.

My journey really started when I had to make some very fast, complex decisions under pressure and I didn’t have control of the clock.

For example, once I was contacted by a journalist at 10:00am to say that she needed a comment on an adverse article she’d written about the company. Her publishing deadline was 3:00pm. If you miss the deadline, the article gets published anyway.

That’s definitely not the best time to pursue a ‘do nothing’ strategy, trust me.

But having had to face many situations like that over the years, the penny finally dropped. The decisions I was making under extreme time pressure were every bit as good as the ones I made when I had all the time in the world.

So, what did I do? I started to look at the DNA of those decisions. What was I actually doing that enabled me to make good calls when, if I had my way, I probably would have taken two or three times as long to make the same decision?

I managed to break it down into the eight core characteristics of a great decision. That’s the foundation of decision making in our Leadership Beyond the Theory program. That’s how you work out how to make great decisions when the heat is on.

To generate momentum, you need to set the right expectations and then increase the decision-making tempo. If you choose to do this, you’ll need to bank some quick wins.

Your people need to see the process working; they need to believe that the change is worthwhile; when they see the outcomes improve, they will grow in confidence and then they’ll keep pushing. If you demonstrate what can be done and people see the outcomes for themselves, it shifts the paradigm about what’s possible.

Let me give you an example. Prior to Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile in the 1950s, reaching that mark was considered to be physically impossible: the general consensus in the medical community was that such a feat was beyond the limits of human endurance.

But once the seal was broken, many others followed in quick succession. In fact, only six weeks after Bannister achieved his groundbreaking feat, Australian John Landy ran an even faster time. And, in the three years following, no less than 15 athletes broke the 4-minute mile.

Today’s record for the mile, a distance that admittedly is rarely run, is 3 minutes and 43 seconds. That’s a full 17 seconds faster than the mark that was previously thought to be impossible.

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS OF INACTION

Why do we move so much slower than we could? The answer to this can be complex, because there are many human factors involved, and often the very nature of the system is designed to slow things down.

Here are the seven biggest momentum killers (let’s call them the seven deadly sins of inaction):

1. Perfectionism.

People who have perfectionistic tendencies like to dress this up as something noble: the quest for greater accuracy and higher quality. But is this really true? More often than not, perfectionists hesitate because they’re afraid to get something wrong.

2. Excessive politeness.

Of course, you should be polite and deferential to your peers, and you should be mindful of the underlying cultural norms. But excessive politeness encourages people to stand back and be silent instead of pushing for a better outcome.

3. Excessive bureaucracy.

The more people you put into a team, the more bureaucracy they’ll create. People who are brought in to govern and maintain quality standards often create a maze of processes and policies. Very little of this infrastructure actually improves performance or quality. It slows the pace to glacial speed, and the more risk averse the organisation, the slower it goes.

4. Excessive collaboration.

When you have to wait for consensus, decision making grinds to a halt. Collaboration’s fine, but it has to be subordinate to single-point accountability. And that means giving decision makers the authority to move quickly: not in a reckless way, but using their judgment and skill to decide when they’ve done enough collaboration, and it’s time to finally act.

5. Lack of clear expectations.

Leadership drives culture… culture drives performance. Your expectations will define precisely how fast your people are going to move. If you want speed, it requires a relentless focus on value. You need to get lean by stripping out all the low value work, and instilling an excellence over perfection mindset. “That’s good enough. Keep going!”

6. Lack of clear decision rights.

Accountable people have to be given the latitude to make their decisions, and those decisions have to be made at the lowest practicable point in the business. You’ll never build momentum if you support a culture of management by committee. Without this discipline, every decision is going to float up to your level.

7. Lack of urgency.

In any work, there are two distinct perspectives on time: There is touch time and then there’s cycle time. Touch time is the time you spend actually working on a problem. Cycle time includes the time in-between, when nothing is actually happening.

For example, holding a one-hour meeting to discuss an important decision? That’s touch time.

But the three weeks that go by after that meeting, while everyone goes away to think about it? That’s cycle time. And in case I haven’t been clear, nothing happens during cycle time.

Those are the seven most common barriers to building momentum in your team, but momentum is what it’s all about. There is no performance if you don’t place relentless attention on speed.

THREE WAYS TO INCREASE MOMENTUM

I could give you a list of 20 things that would help you to build momentum into your culture; not for its own sake, of course, but to radically improve the way your team performs.

But in this newsletter, I’m just going to give you my top three. These are three no-regrets moves that you can make from today onwards: no matter what level you’re at; no matter what industry you’re in; and no matter what countries you operate across.

1. Be unreasonable in your expectations for speed.

Don’t just accept the tempo that your people are comfortable with. Remember, no one below you is going to move faster than you do.

So, always question the first estimate you’re presented with. I’m not suggesting you adopt a tone-deaf Nike boss approach (“Just do it!”). You’ve got to be deliberate, and clear, and thoughtful.

Ask the killer question: “If we decided we wanted to get this done faster, what would it take?”

This brings out your people’s creativity, and often they’ll come up with solutions that no one had thought of until you pushed them.

Once you’ve got some options, then you’ve got choices you can make. You can invest more to go faster (if you choose to do so), or you can leave things the way they are; and nothing’s lost. This is a no-regrets move, because even if you decide not to change anything, you’ve at least sent a clear cultural message to your people: We value speed and we’re always looking for ways to build greater momentum.

2. Protect your people’s decision rights.

Nothing is surer to slow things down than unclear decision rights. Excuses can only exist where clarity is lacking. Make sure that, if you’re asking someone to take accountability for an outcome, they have the autonomy and the control that they need to deliver it.

If you allow decisions below you to be made by consensus, you’re putting a handbrake on progress. Consensus completely shifts the focus; and not in a good way.

Instead of working out how to get the best outcome, everyone’s focus changes. Then they’re trying to work out how to appease the people who are involved in the process. It is a recipe for disaster.

That’s how poor decisions are made. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You’re the leader. You get to decide where the decision rights live.

3. Focus on cycle time.

Don’t let decisions, and problems, and issues drift. To get greater speed, eliminate that dead space between touchpoints where nothing is happening. This may mean putting some preemptive mechanisms in place.

For example, never leave a meeting where more information must be gathered, without setting a deadline for that out-of-session work to be brought back to the accountable decision maker.

And, be clear that power of veto is not acceptable. Just because one opinion leader isn’t on board doesn’t mean the whole process should be put on hold just to appease them. If you want to reduce cycle time, you have to track it carefully.

Make sure you know (at every point) who’s got the ball, and build a sense of urgency for those who do.

PERSONAL MOMENTUM FIRST, THEN TEAM

If you want a team that performs in all conditions, momentum is the secret sauce. The three tips I’ve just walked you through are going to go a long way to helping you to build it. But unless you work on increasing your own personal momentum, no one in your team will feel as though they need to pay the slightest bit of attention to you.

Obviously, there’s a lot more to this than meets the eye. So I’d really encourage you to think about joining us for our June cohort of Leadership Beyond the Theory, which starts on Monday 29th June, 2026.

This is where we go deep on how to lead for performance in your specific context. The devil is absolutely in the detail when you’re leading ,and I love nothing more than helping people break through the barriers that are holding them and their teams back.