Your team may not lack urgency. They may simply be responding accurately to the diluted, over-negotiated, low-consequence environment you have designed. Here is what it takes to fix that, and why it runs through you before it reaches them.
When teams lack momentum
“When I look around the office, nobody is breaking a sweat.”
François founded a billion-dollar tech business. His business hit some market turbulence, and he needed his team to execute hard and fast.
Yet when I walked around the office on a Tuesday morning, it didn’t feel like Mission Control. It felt like a chilled-out cyber café. Just without the cookies.
Pat said the same thing. She leads a smaller manufacturing firm. All her dashboards are green, but quarterly results keep disappointing.
“In a crisis, my team is amazing,” she told me. “But on a typical month, it feels like they’re just phoning it in.”
Two leaders. Both have capable team members who aren’t showing the drive and focus needed to deliver the company’s biggest strategic goals.
Perhaps you can relate.
You want a team that drives the business forward with focus and pace. A team that owns the mission and pushes it forward, even without you.
And it’s maddening when you look at your team and think: this should be a Ferrari, but it’s trundling along like a tractor.
Your head of sales turns up at 10am. Your chief of staff spends half her time nagging your execs about their deliverables. Your team complain about working flat out, but the big projects move with all the urgency of a teenager ambling to school.
This lack of strategic velocity costs you revenue, margin, growth. And it pulls your attention away from the big moves and strategic decisions you should be making.
The good news is it’s solvable. I’ve helped plenty of teams break exactly this pattern.
You’ve been doing all the things
Pat told me all the things she’d tried.
- The vision statement.
- The six corporate priorities.
- The OKR system and reporting.
- The conversations she’d had to urge, clarify and explain to her team.
- And the follow-ups. Oh, all the follow-ups…
“Surely it shouldn’t be this hard? These are senior people. I shouldn’t have to chase grown adults for their homework.”
Sound familiar? You’ve done everything you were told would fix this. It still isn’t coming together.
Why is that? Because none of it was ever going to work.
Let me explain why by turning to the famous story of Cisco.
When Cisco destroyed strategic focus
When I joined Cisco, it operated around 15 ‘boards and councils’ to run strategic priorities across its 50,000+ workforce. It was pretty effective.
Around 2009, new collaboration tools made it easier to spin up more. We went from 15 to over 50. Sounded plausible enough: 50,000 people, surely they could handle 50 priorities?
What actually happened:
- No focus.
- Slower decisions.
- Weaker accountability.
- Huge coordination overhead.
Cisco missed several billion-dollar market shifts, cloud among them, despite having councils explicitly looking at those areas.
Strategic velocity collapsed.
A couple of years later, CEO John Chambers ate humble pie, simplified dramatically, and rolled back to about eight priorities. Growth came back almost immediately.
Your system needs to shift
Here’s the uncomfortable part. Cisco’s people didn’t change. Same talent, before, during and after. Only the structure changed. Performance swung wildly anyway.
So the salient question isn’t how do we convince people to work harder and faster?
It’s what would make focused ownership structurally unavoidable?
Most leaders focus on the first question, which is why their results stay patchy at best.
You urge faster progress, but you can’t push someone into wanting to win.
You explain more, but you’re not actually dealing with a clarity problem.
You roll out a new dashboard or OKR process, but ownership and drive were never a project management problem.
No wonder none of it has worked. These are sensible moves aimed at the wrong target. Here’s the real one:
Your current way of operating cannot create focused delivery at pace.
Because if it could, you’d have it by now.
How to design for urgency
As we’ve seen, urging urgency doesn’t work. Engineering it does.
You have to make it structural, across four levers.
Clarity
Most companies have a wall of goals, KPIs and competing priorities. People get used to a bunch of green lights, a few yellow, a couple of red.
Instead, pick one sentence: a falsifiable claim about what winning looks like this year. If you can’t, that’s the problem already.
For Pat, we turned a half-page of objectives into one line: “By 31st December: revenue of X, margin of Y, and our two major IT projects delivered so we begin next year with new capabilities.”
Focus
Most companies claim to be focused on key priorities, but fail in the same two ways.
First error: too many priorities. François’s business was running fifteen companywide initiatives. Scratch the surface and each one hid several more underneath.
Just like Cisco, too many priorities gives the illusion of productivity but actually creates complexity, lack of accountability, and management overhead. His own execs couldn’t name all fifteen initiatives, let alone drive them at pace.
Second error: deliverables, not outcomes. An outcome goal such as “hit $100M EBITDA” rapidly fades into the background, replaced by initiatives such as “improve the customer retention script” and “run flagship customer event.”
At some point there was a clear line back to EBITDA. By the time it reaches the team, that line has gone slack, and people can work hard on their deliverable without ever asking whether it’s actually working. This is pervasive and almost invisible, because there’s a paper trail proving “progress.” But it kills urgency dead.
Keep attention on one to four strategic outcomes. No more.
Accountability
Most leadership teams agree on goals easily enough. What’s missing is the part that bites: a firm, dated commitment, made out loud, to each other.
This often happens because leaders don’t feel fully in control of outcomes. François’s CTO was reluctant to commit to product feature release dates because the codebase was old and “we don’t know what we’ll find until we start.” And yet sales leaders make revenue commitments every quarter, despite having zero control over what customers actually do. So it isn’t impossible.
Even once you get the commitment, the harder test comes after: what happens when it isn’t delivered? Too often, nothing. It gets quietly absorbed into next month’s update, and the system learns that commitments are optional.
Instead of alignment, install consequence.
Urgency
With clarity, focus and accountability in place, you dial up the velocity with a small set of imminent, consequential deadlines, and by changing what you actually discuss when you meet.
Most ExCo meetings review deliverables. Did the report ship. Did the project hit its milestone. You can spend a full hour on that and never once ask whether the business actually moved.
Swap it: review the outcome first, every time. If revenue, margin or retention hasn’t shifted, that’s the headline, whatever else got delivered.
Short cycles help too. A consequential deadline six weeks out creates pressure that one twelve months out never will.
You cannot lead in the same way
Nothing above is rocket science. So why do most companies have something that looks similar to this, and still don’t get the pace and ownership they want?
Because all four levers require something more from you, not just your team.
The exposure of naming the hill
When I asked François’s team for the must-win goals this quarter, I got a different answer from everyone in the room.
François rattled off a few lines from the annual plan. Sounded fine, but I didn’t hear true conviction behind any of them. Nothing that told me he was actually willing to stake anything on making them happen in the next twelve weeks.
That’s the work, and this is why it’s hard: you have to commit, and put yourself on the line for a result where there’s a real possibility of failure. If your team doesn’t deliver on that, the buck stops with you.
The commitment of cutting back
“We don’t need fewer projects. We need more productivity.”
A classic pushback, and it sounds reasonable if you’re not seeing much urgency, especially if you feel you have a substantial business that can handle multiple projects.
Cisco could handle fifty priorities too. Until it couldn’t. Focus only means something once you cut something good in pursuit of something better.
Here’s what’s actually happening. You’re protecting yourself from the risk of choosing wrong. It’s safer to fund fifteen projects and blame the team when none of them land, than to back three and own the result if they don’t.
The discomfort of raising the tension
Pat pushed back when I told her the team needed to feel real stakes and time pressure, from her. “I don’t want to coerce people,” she said. “And I don’t want to micromanage the business.”
Fair concern. Pump your own anxiety into an already overloaded system and you’ll get unhealthy pressure, even coercion.
But say nothing when an outcome stalls, and urgency dies anyway. Everyone in the room is watching to see whether you’ll actually act. The consequence that matters most was never punishment. It’s visibility. There’s nowhere left to hide when an outcome that everyone can see isn’t moving.
Holding a high standard and naming what matters isn’t coercion, nor micromanagement. It’s just leadership most people stopped practising.
What makes it hard: you want to be liked. Holding tension without tipping into nagging or ranting is a calibration most leaders never learned.
The energy to show the urgency yourself
The simplest, hardest test in all of this: look in the mirror.
You want your team to execute with focus, at speed. But are you?
If your own calendar, your own decisions and your own follow-through don’t show focus and pace, no script, framework or pep talk will make your team show it for you.
Regaining ‘positive fire’
What both François and Pat discovered, working with me, was the extent to which their team was reflecting their own leadership back at them.
François was frustrated and angry. But underneath that, he was withholding the belief and commitment he wanted his team to show. We called it “positive fire.” He hadn’t lit it himself.
Pat complained about low standards, but she’d been tolerating those exact standards for years.
Breaking the pattern, for both of them, meant unlearning years of instinctive responses and building new ones in their place.
When teams regain strategic urgency
Within a few weeks of that work, here is what changed for François’s team:
- François stopped radiating frustration and started declaring outcomes, making faster calls, setting the pace himself.
- Fifteen priority initiatives became three must-win outcomes for the quarter.
- A bloated reporting deck became a single page.
- The exec team started meeting weekly to unblock and coordinate, not just update.
- Two execs who didn’t rise to it are no longer on the team. Overdue, but it happened.
What surprised even me was the energy. A few structural moves created more focus and optimism across the business than months of pushing for urgency ever had.
When urgency becomes something you engineer instead of something you demand, progress moves faster than you’d think.
Fastest routes to making this happen
There aren’t many months left in the financial year. But there’s time to make a defining move that structurally raises your strategic velocity, if you act now.
You’re unlikely to make that move alone. The dynamics already at work in your team will keep pulling you back to the status quo. You need something, or someone, to interrupt that pull.
Two practical ways I can help.
If you want a quick, low-commitment way in, apply to attend the Crucible of Acceleration. It’s a 90-minute working session where you leave having committed to one bold decision, the kind that kills busywork and refocuses your organisation on what actually moves the business this year.
If you want direct support, for yourself or your team, book a call. Like François and Pat, the shift can happen faster than you’d expect, sometimes within weeks.
