379 4 Reasons Your Team Isn't Doing What You Asked and Why Your Go-to Leadership Fix Makes It Worse

By the end of this episode, you'll know four different reasons your team isn't doing what you asked. You'll know why the fix you naturally reach for can make it worse, and you'll know how to find the fix that will actually work for your team. Welcome to Leadership Without Losing Your Soul, a podcast helping human-centered leaders master communication to accelerate your team's performance, reduce stress, and build a career with the respect and influence you deserve. I'm your host, David Dai, president of Let's Grow Leaders. Hey, welcome to the show. You've explained it and clearly or so you thought you sent the follow-up email, you brought it up again in the team meeting, maybe you even wrote it all out with bullet points in a deadline, and still it's not happening. The report comes in late, the new process gets skipped, what you asked for shows up, half done, or it doesn't show up at all. And if you're like most of the leaders I work with, your response isn't that you stop caring, it's you care harder, you explain it again, you check in more often, you stay late, you fix it yourself, and then that quiet voice starts and well, maybe it's them, maybe they just don't care, or even worse, maybe it's me, maybe I'm just not cut out for this. That's the moment, so many good leaders start losing a little of their soul. You catch yourself hovering, snapping in a meeting, or maybe lower the bar because pushing feels pointless, and you're frustrated and you're tired. Here's what I want you to hear, the problem, most likely isn't your effort, and it probably isn't your people. It's that you're working hard on the wrong fix. When your team isn't doing what you asked, it feels like there's just one problem, but what you're really looking at is one symptom. Let's say the work's not getting done the way it needs to. That's a symptom, it's not just one problem, it's one symptom, and there are at least four potential causes or reasons that symptoms happening, and each one needs a different solution. So here's what makes this tricky. Almost every leader, myself included, has a go-to leadership fix, the thing you're naturally good at. If you're a strong communicator, you double down on that, you explain it. Again, better. If you're organized and driven, you tighten up accountability. If you're a relationship person, you check in, you sympathize, you encourage, and these are all good tools, but when you're using the right tool on the wrong problem, it doesn't just fail. It often makes things worse. Your team gets more confused, more frustrated, or they go silent, and you get more convinced the problems them. Or you start to doubt yourself. Either way, today, I want to walk you through four different examples, four different teams. Every one of them has the same symptom. They're not doing what their leader asked, but the cause is different each time, and so is the solution, so is the leadership fix. So as we go through these, I want you to notice which one feels familiar to you. And stick around, because at the end, I'll show you a quick way to find out which of these four is holding your team back. Okay, team one, let's picture a team where everyone is busy, genuinely working hard, long hours, full calendars, but when you step back, the work doesn't add up. One person is polishing a deliverable that's not the priority. Another one's moving fast on something that's going to have to be redone. The projects come back supposedly done, but it's not at all what you meant by done. And so what's your go-to leadership fix here? Maybe it's a pep talk or tighter accountability. We got to step it up. I need everyone to own their results. Well, here's why that backfires. If people have different pictures of success, pushing harder just sends them faster in different directions. You get more effort, but the same disappointing results. And now they're tired and frustrated too on top of it. What's missing here is clarity. A shared understanding of what success looks like, what a successful outcome does, why it matters and how to achieve those results in the first place. So the first solution here, the first thing you want to look for is to define success together. Don't just announce it. Ask, what does a successful outcome do here? What will be true when we've really nailed this? Then check for understanding, not does that make sense because everyone will just not along at that. Instead, you say something like, so just so I know that I've explained it well or so I can confirm we're all on the same page here. How would you describe what we're going for? And even after you've checked for understanding, you still want to plan to communicate it at least five times five different ways. So if it's critical to your success, what feels repetitive to you is often the first time your team internalizes it. And even more so, the higher up in the organization you get, and if you want people who are a couple of rows below you in an org chart, internalizing things five times, five different ways is only the beginning. If your team is busy, but not productive, you want to start first with clarity. Okay, team two, team two gets it. You have a great meeting. Everyone's nodding. You check for understanding. Everyone's on the same page. The ideas are good. The energy is good. People will say, yes, let's do it. And then nothing happens. A week later, you ask about it and you get the blank looks or those nervous stairs or, oh, I thought Maria was handling that. Or wait, did you do that? Oh, no, I didn't do that either. Two weeks later, you're still having that same conversation again. So you go to leadership fix here might be to re-explain the vision, make the case again with more passion, maybe a better slide. This is why this matters so much. But they already understood. Understanding isn't the problem here. So re-explaining, can feel to your people like you think they're slow and it is burning time. You don't have what's missing here is commitment. Follow through that's based on a clear agreement. You got to clear agreement and consistent follow through. So when you're lacking that follow through, you got understanding, but you lack follow through the solution here is to end every important conversation with three questions. Who is doing what by win and how will we know? Who's doing what by win? How will we know? And that last one is super critical. How will we know turns a vague intention into something everyone can see? It also forces you to look at competing priorities and make sure that what you're trying to do is feasible. And it does something that many leaders skip is you're scheduling the follow through. Put it on the calendar. How will we know is that follow through step? Maybe it's a one-on-one meeting where it's going to be discussed. Maybe there's a handoff. Maybe there's information that's coming to other team members. There's always something that makes it clear. This thing was completed. If you don't come back to it, your team learns the work doesn't really matter. When it gets done, celebrate it. When it doesn't, you have the conversation, the accountability conversation without blame, focus on what happens next and what you need to do differently or to renew your commitment. So if your team agrees in the room and nothing happens afterward, invest in commitment. All right, this third underlying cause is sneaky. The team knows what to do. They know why it matters. They genuinely want to do it. You've scheduled the finish and things still aren't getting done. Why? Because they can't. There's something systemic getting in the way. Maybe people are overloaded. There are competing priorities coming from dotted lines. The system they're supposed to use is clunky. It's outdated overlaps with two other systems or they've been told to take more ownership and nobody's ever shown them what that looks like on a Tuesday afternoon with all of the things that are competing for their attention. Your go-to leadership fix here might be to follow up harder, more check-ins, more reminders, a performance conversation, or maybe you lean on connection. Maybe even sympathy. Hey, I know it's hard, but we've got to double down, gut it out, get it done. And that's where this gets painful. You're holding people accountable for something that systems blocking. And they'll feel unfairly judged. Or if not judged, they'll feel inadequate because they feel like they should be able to succeed, but don't know why they aren't. You feel ignored. And again, you never solve the underlying problem. What's missing here? Curiosity. Genuine interest in what's actually happening for the people closest to the work. The solution here is a simple question that you can ask sincerely. What's getting in the way? Then listen and ask, what else? Then figure out how you can do something with at least one of those answers. Remove a step, push back on a deadline. Show what good looks like with a specific example. When your team wants to do it, you've got all the clarity and follow through schedule that you need and still can't. It's time to start with curiosity. Now, the fourth cause is one that can hide the other three. On this team, problems stay invisible until they blow up. Nobody tells you that they're confused about the priority. Nobody mentions their drowning. Nobody says, I don't think this plan will work. Or that this system's inadequate to get them what we need to. You find out late from a misdeadline, an angry customer, or somebody's resignation letter. And your go-to leadership fix here might be to add process, a new status report, a dashboard, or another standing meeting. But more reporting doesn't create more truth. People fill in the dashboard and still not tell you what's really going on. The test here is if your team doesn't talk with you about a problem or won't bring it up, that's not a process issue, that's a trust issue. And when trust is the issue, connection is what's missing. Connection is all about knowing one another as human beings, well enough that bad news feels safe to share. So your solution here has two parts. First, you want to watch how you respond when someone brings you a problem. If the messenger pays a price, even with a sigh or just a sharp tone, you won't get messages. People won't raise the issues. And if you find yourself doing that, instead start to thank people for raising hard things. When someone brings you that challenge, thank them for having the guts and the courage to raise the issue. Encourage that. Get more of what you encourage and celebrate. And then the second thing to do with connection is invest in knowing your people beyond the tasks that they perform the roles that they play. Ask what matters to them. Show up as a human being yourself, get to know one another as human beings, creating that mutual understanding so that they do feel the comfort to bring you those situations. If your team's problems stay hidden until it's too late, time to invest in connection. So you've got four different teams, they have one symptom, but there are four different fixes here, four different causes and four different solutions. Now for the hard part, most of us can't see which one is ours. It's not because you aren't smart or self-aware. Because we all diagnose through our strengths. I do this too. If clarity is your gift, every problem can look like a clarity problem. So you double down on more explanation. If you're graded accountability, every problem looks like a follow-through issue. With the challenge that's truly holding your team back, it can sit right in your blind spot. So here's a quick gut check. I'm going to ask you four questions, be honest with yourself. Could everyone on your team describe what success looks like this quarter in the same words? Do the agreements that you make in meetings leave the room with a name, a date, and a specific time, and people know how they'll be followed up on? When did you last ask what's getting in the way and actually change something because of the answer? Would your team tell you if they were overloaded, confused, or thought you were wrong? Now, if one of those made you wints a little bit, pay attention to that. But here's the catch. Your gut is still biased toward the problems you already know how to solve. That's exactly why the fix-to-keep reaching for doesn't work. So how do you find out which one of these is yours without guessing? Well, I've built a leadership self-assessment for exactly this. It takes about three minutes to answer a few questions and it'll score you on all four dimensions. Connection, clarity, curiosity, commitment. Totally free. Shows you where your effort will make the biggest difference right now. You get a personalized report in your inbox within a minute. It explains what that dimension does for your team when it's strong, what it costs when it's struggling, and where to start. To take it and go to the show notes, wherever you're listening right now, the top of the show notes click the first link, very top. That's it. First link, top of the show notes, wherever you're listening, three minutes. Take it today. See where you land. And let me leave you with this. When your team isn't doing what you asked, it's tempting to conclude that you need to work harder or that they do. And usually neither of those things is true. You probably don't need to try harder. You need to try differently. So this week, pick one. Whatever your lowest dimension turns out to be, try the solution from that team. Define success together. And with who's doing what by when, how will we know? Ask what's getting in the way and do something with an answer. Thank the person who brings you bad news. It's their small, specific solutions that are aimed at the right problem. That's how you get results without losing your soul. To check out the survey, top link in the show notes wherever you're listening, and I will see you next time. I'm your host, David Dai reminding you to be the leader you'd want your boss to be.