A full diary, an overflowing inbox, and a team rushing from one deadline to the next can all create the impression that a business is highly productive. Yet all that activity can hide a more uncomfortable reality. People may be working incredibly hard without moving the business forward.
Activity is visible, easy to measure, and provides short-term reassurance. Real productivity requires deep focus, strategic clarity, and disciplined decision-making. Without clear priorities and a defined decision flow, people can spend much of their working day navigating bad systems rather than doing work that creates value.
As businesses grow, says growth strategist Dori Moreno, ways of working that were manageable with a small team can start creating bottlenecks. Becoming productive therefore does not necessarily mean working faster. Businesses may need to look at what is creating the busyness in the first place.
Here are five practical shifts that can help.
1. Stop making every decision a leadership decision
When team members need approval for routine operational matters, work slows while people wait. Employees start to hesitate, over-check, or escalate issues they should be able to handle themselves. The solution is to make decision-making authority explicit. “People cannot take ownership of what hasn’t been made clear,” explains Moreno. That could mean establishing decision thresholds for different roles, allowing team members to make defined calls without management sign-off. Clear boundaries allow capable people to act and stop permission-seeking from becoming part of how the business operates.
2. Find the shadow systems slowing everyone down
Some productivity problems begin as convenient shortcuts that gradually become part of the way a business operates. Moreno recently facilitated a two-day strategy session for a large business struggling to meet its deliverables. WhatsApp had quietly become the default communication channel between employees and heads of department, as well as with major clients.
What began as a quick, informal workaround had effectively replaced operating procedures. Critical client information was lost in chat threads, accountability disappeared, and team members were perpetually distracted. The business had fallen so far behind that it risked losing the client.
Informal workarounds can feel fast in the moment, but without structure they create risk and drag down execution. Businesses should look for these “shadow systems” and identify where they are compensating for weak processes.
3. Let the team identify what is getting in the way
Leaders can inadvertently hurt productivity when they over-function by stepping in to solve every operational challenge themselves.
Moreno recommends spending around 20% of leadership conversations speaking and 80% listening. Rather than telling everyone what needs to happen, leaders can ask open-ended questions that help the team identify where work is getting stuck. For a delayed product launch, that could mean asking what operational roadblocks stand between the business and its deadline. The people closest to the work can then identify the bottlenecks and co-create the action plan rather than becoming passive order-takers.
4. Stop treating everything as urgent
When the immediate crisis or latest notification is allowed to hijack the daily agenda, teams become trapped in reactive firefighting. Moreno advocates “Slow Leadership”, consciously pausing long enough to separate what is genuinely time-sensitive from what simply feels loud or uncomfortable.
A regular strategic pause can give leaders space to review capacity and priorities. Before adding another task, they can ask whether it serves the business’s immediate strategic goals and what will need to move if it is added. The focus should be on capacity rather than speed. Prioritising everything means prioritising nothing, so leaders need to identify which lever will create space and unblock the rest of the team.
5. End meetings with ownership, not nodding
Meetings can create an impression of progress when everyone has attended, discussed the issue and apparently agreed. Moreno describes the assumption that attendance or nodding means everyone understands what happens next as “false alignment”.
Important meetings should end by confirming what was decided, who owns it, and what changes next. Different interpretations can then be resolved before they lead to delays, duplicated work, or another meeting. Ultimately, productivity is not about how much activity a business can generate. Leaders need to look at whether work is moving strategic goals forward and operational friction is reducing.
When systems and expectations are clear, Moreno says the “emotional temperature” drops. There is less rework, fewer errors, and less constant firefighting. Perhaps the strongest test is autonomy without leadership intervention. When the business continues executing and making progress when the leader is not in the room, productivity is no longer dependent on how hard one person can work. It has become part of how the business works.
