I’ve been watching teams make adjustments lately. The same challenge, different responses.
One team gets feedback that execution is lagging. They immediately add another meeting to the calendar. A “sync” on Fridays to review progress. They’ve now created seven standing meetings each week.
Another team facing the same issue? They eliminate two meetings and create a shared dashboard instead.
Both teams are responding to the same problem. But their choices tell completely different stories about what they actually value.
The first team values the appearance of coordination over the reality of execution. They’re choosing comfort, the familiar ritual of gathering over the harder work of clarifying accountability. More meetings feel like doing something, even when they’re the very thing preventing anything from getting done.
The second team values time. They recognized that their people don’t need more talking about the work. They need more time to do it.
Here’s what I notice: When teams face pressure, they default to adding rather than subtracting. More checkpoints. More approvals. More oversight. It feels safer. But addition is often subtraction in disguise – subtracting autonomy, subtracting focus, subtracting trust.
The adjustments you make under stress reveal your operating system. Do you trust your people or your processes? Do you value speed or certainty? Do you believe in clarity or control?
Last month, a CEO told me his team was struggling with decision-making. So he created a new decision-making framework. Seven steps. A matrix. Required sign-offs at three levels.
I asked him: “What if the problem isn’t that your team doesn’t know how to decide? What if it’s that they’re afraid to?”
He paused. Then admitted he’d recently overruled two decisions publicly.
His adjustment,the framework, wasn’t solving the real problem. It was avoiding it. He was optimizing the wrong thing.
A better approach? Start by asking what the adjustment reveals about your current emphasis.
If you’re adding oversight, ask: Is our real issue capability or trust?
If you’re adding structure, ask: Is our real issue clarity or control?
If you’re adding resources, ask: Is our real issue capacity or priorities?
The most powerful adjustments aren’t additions. They’re subtractions paired with elevation.
Remove the bottleneck, elevate the decision-maker. Remove the report, elevate the conversation. Remove the approval layer, elevate the accountability.
Your adjustments are a mirror. They show you what you actually believe about how value gets created, how decisions get made, how people perform.
Most teams would improve more by making fewer adjustments and questioning the ones they’re about to make.
What are you about to tweak? And what does that choice say about what you really value?
