Why your team isn’t performing (and why it’s not their fault)

You’ve built a strong business. You’ve got good people. But lately… things just aren’t moving as fast as they should.
You can feel it — that drag between intention and delivery.

Here’s the truth: most performance problems aren’t about talent or effort.
They’re about focus and clarity.

Your voice — the direction, the purpose — gets lost in the layers between you and your teams.
They hear the what, but not always the why.
And while you’re busy looking to the future (as you should), there’s nobody shaping the journey from today to there.

Teams are often fighting the past too. Fixing legacy problems, cleaning up messes, dealing with decisions made with the best of intentions but the wrong context. They need time and space to stabilise before they can accelerate.

And here’s the kicker: lazy people are rare. What I usually find are people who’ve forgotten how to care.
They’ve been dulled by endless “transformation” projects and middle-management noise.
By consultants who breeze through every year with new frameworks but no ownership.
By organisations that demand change but don’t reward it.

You’ll see the warning signs if you look:
• Work that doesn’t move
• Queues building up
• Blockers becoming normal
• Lots of “busy”, very little “done”

The system is the problem, not the people.
A team is a system inside your wider company system.
Feed it too much work and it slows down.
Push for certainty and you kill curiosity.
Demand everything and you get nothing.

Less = Focus. Focus = Delivery.

That’s not philosophy — it’s physics.

Start with visibility, then communication, then collaboration.
You can’t fix what you can’t see, and you can’t improve what people are scared to talk about.

Nobody comes to work to do a bad job.
They just can’t see how their actions ripple through the business.

So talk to your teams.
Be clear about what today means for the business and for them.
Ask what’s holding them back.
You’ll be amazed what you hear when they trust you enough to answer honestly.

Because improving performance isn’t about adding more.
It’s about removing what’s in the way.

Less = Focus. Focus = Delivery.