By Michael King
There was a moment in the middle of a leadership meeting last year where I realized the team in front of me wasn’t struggling because they lacked direction. If anything, they had too much of it. The strategy was clear, the vision had been articulated more than once, and the people in the room were more than capable. On paper, this was the kind of team most organizations would envy. But sitting there, listening to the updates, watching the subtle pauses and the way certain conversations drifted instead of landed, it became obvious that something far more fundamental was breaking down. It wasn’t loud or catastrophic. It was quieter than that. A missed follow-up here, a vague ownership line there, priorities that sounded right in the room but somehow dissolved by Thursday. Nothing you could point to as failure, but enough to guarantee they would never really win.
What struck me most wasn’t the inconsistency itself, but how quickly the leaders moved to absorb it. You could see it happen in real time. A task mentioned without a clear owner would get picked up by whoever felt the tension first. A commitment that should have been tracked would get mentally logged by someone already carrying too much. They weren’t ignoring the gaps. They were compensating for them. And they had gotten very good at it. Good enough, in fact, that from the outside the business still looked functional. Revenue was steady. Clients were being served. The machine was moving. But internally, it was being held together by effort that no one had the margin to sustain.
At one point, one of the leaders made an offhand comment about feeling like he was managing details he shouldn’t have to think about. It was said lightly, almost as a throwaway, but it landed heavier than he intended. Because that’s usually how these things show up. Not as declarations, but as small admissions that slip out when people are too tired to filter them. The room moved on, but the comment stayed with me. It was the clearest signal that the issue wasn’t capability or even commitment. It was energy. More specifically, the slow erosion of energy that happens when accountability lives entirely on the shoulders of people instead of being built into the environment they operate in.
Most teams never address this directly. They talk about accountability, they reinforce expectations, they revisit priorities, but underneath it all they are relying on human discipline to carry a load that is fundamentally structural. And human discipline, no matter how strong, is inconsistent under pressure. So the system begins to bend. Standards soften in ways no one formally agrees to. High performers stretch to cover the gaps, and in doing so unintentionally teach the rest of the team that the gaps are acceptable. Leaders step in more often than they should, not because they want control, but because they can’t tolerate the consequences of things slipping. And over time, what started as a few minor inconsistencies becomes a culture where execution depends entirely on who is paying attention in the moment.
That was the turning point for us. Not a dramatic decision, but a quiet acknowledgment that we weren’t going to fix this by asking people to try harder. The problem wasn’t effort. It was that the system required too much of it to function. So instead of focusing on behavior, we shifted our attention to the structure underneath it. We began integrating AI into the daily operating rhythm of the team, not as a headline initiative or a piece of innovation to showcase, but as a way to remove the invisible weight the leaders had been carrying for too long. Commitments were no longer something you had to remember to track. They existed in a place that updated in real time. Follow-through didn’t rely on someone circling back when they had a moment. The system surfaced it. Gaps didn’t linger quietly until they became problems. They were visible early, when they were still easy to address.
The change wasn’t immediate, and it wasn’t flashy. In fact, if you had walked in during the first couple of weeks, you might have missed it entirely. But if you paid attention, you could feel a shift in the room. The leaders were less tense. Not because there was less to do, but because they weren’t carrying all of it in their heads anymore. Conversations became more focused. Ownership became clearer without needing to be forced. There was less repetition, less circling back, less of that low-grade friction that drains a team over time. And maybe most importantly, accountability stopped feeling personal. It wasn’t about who dropped the ball or who needed to step up. It was simply part of how the team operated.
What surprised me was how quickly the culture followed the system. We tend to think of culture as something you define through values and reinforce through conversation, but in reality it is shaped just as much by what the environment allows and what it corrects. When accountability became consistent, the team adjusted. Not because they were told to, but because the path of least resistance changed. Clarity replaced assumption. Follow-through became normal instead of exceptional. And the leaders, for the first time in a while, had enough space to actually lead instead of constantly managing the aftermath of things that should have been handled upstream.
By the end of the year, the business had grown by just over 2.8 million dollars in revenue. There wasn’t a new strategy driving it. No major pivot. No breakthrough idea that changed the game. It came from finally executing what had been sitting in front of them the entire time, buried under a system that couldn’t support it. That’s the part that sticks with me. Not the number itself, but how unnecessary the struggle had been leading up to it.
There’s a tendency, especially among experienced leaders, to assume that if something isn’t working, the answer is to push harder or think differently. And sometimes that’s true. But more often than not, the real issue is that the system they’re operating in requires an unsustainable level of attention to produce consistent results. And no matter how strong the leader is, that kind of dependency eventually breaks down.
What changed for this team wasn’t their ambition or their capability. It was that they stopped relying on effort to hold everything together and started building a structure that could carry the weight with them. AI happened to be the tool that made that possible in this case, but the deeper shift was philosophical. They moved from managing performance to designing for it.
And once that happens, everything feels different. Not easier, necessarily, but more stable. More predictable. More aligned with the outcomes they were aiming for all along.
If you’re honest, you already know where execution is breaking down on your team.
The question is whether it’s a people problem… or a system problem.
If you want a clear answer, start here:
Take the Team Performance Diagnostic → www.teams.coach
About Michael King
Michael King is an award-winning executive coach and the founder of Teams.Coach, Gawker Traffic, and CatalystCo. With two master’s degrees in Leadership and Executive Coaching from Bellevue University, he helps high-performing executives simplify complexity, optimize their leadership, and build teams that actually work.
A certified executive coach, Michael has spent years guiding Fortune 500 leaders, entrepreneurs, and teams through the real work of leadership—creating clarity, building systems, and driving results without the burnout.
When he’s not coaching, Michael is an accomplished singer/songwriter and music producer with over 100 published songs to his credit. He’s also a Ducati aficionado, a die-hard Apple fan, and probably has a Starbucks in his hand right now.
