Leaders Who Look Deeper: How to Build a Workplace Worth Showing Up For

I don’t talk about it much on this blog but over the past 5 years, I’ve been hard at work learning exactly how productivity works and doesn’t work in organizations of various sizes.

Today, I want to share what I’ve learned.

Hands-On Productivity

As the co-founder of Super Productive, I’ve had a front row seat to the inner workings of how individuals, teams, sub-teams, departments, and entire enterprises operate.

My role on the team is to design the technology solution our clients need. As someone who is both neurodivergent and obsessed with both leadership and communication, I’m also constantly thinking about what different brains and personalities need to actually adopt a given technology or system.

Time and time again, I have seen that technology adoption and productivity gains, are not simply the result of a shiny new application. Nor is it simply due to change management expertise. And it’s definitely not a matter of how many “A-players” the team has.

When we sat down to really look at what was happening across all of the engagements we’ve had, we discovered a clear and unmistakable set of patterns.

The Productivity Patterns

To understand how productivity really works, we need to start with what it looks like when it doesn’t work. And to be clear, it’s not just whether we get more output with flat or decreasing labor costs…it’s 2026, not 1926.

After careful analysis, we discovered that there are exactly six categories of pain points that organizations of every size deal with.

In plain english it might sound like “it takes too long to make decisions” or “quality varies depending on who handled it.” Maybe it sounds like “everyone is busy, all of the time, and burned out, but our output isn’t any better.”

There are a lot of ways people say it, but it always comes back to these six pain points:

1. Speed

The team is perpetually behind. Decisions drag. Deliverables slip. There’s a constant sense of chasing something that’s always just out of reach.

2. Consistency

Quality simply fluctuates too much. It might be who did it, or when they did it, or even what kind of week they were having.

3. Output

Despite the fact that everyone is working and calendars are packed, somehow the volume of meaningful, finished work doesn’t add up.

4. Innovation

The work is solid, maybe even good. But it tends to feel safe. Predictable. Like the team is executing well without ever reaching for something genuinely…better.

5. Prioritization

Everything feels urgent, no one really seems to know what matters most. And inevitably what actually is most important, doesn’t get enough attention.

6. Burnout

You see it in the glazed eyes and slumped shoulders. The ones who haven’t left yet, are definitely thinking about it. The culture of pushing through has been pushed too far.

Most organizations are living with several of these pains at any given time. Many are dealing with all six simultaneously, each one making the others worse. Without intervention, is it any wonder why things just aren’t working.

So what can we do?

The Inversion Trap

When most organizations become aware of these problems, they often only have two blunt strategies to try: carrots and sticks.

Whether dangling rewards or punishments, the most common responses to these six pains boil down to trying to push in the opposite direction.

The team isn’t moving fast enough? Push for faster by rewarding speed or punishing lags.

Output is falling short? Get on a call and tell everyone to “produce more” …or else.

Burnout is creeping in? Tell people to take care of themselves when they get home (but make sure to check your email).

I call this strategy “Inverse Pressure,” because instead of finding a solution, it just applies pressure by trying to invert the pain like a kid declaring “it’s opposite day!” The instinct to invert is understandable. It’s just usually wrong, making the problem worse while destroying morale.

Because pushing for more output from people who are already stretched doesn’t create capacity that isn’t there. Telling a struggling team to move faster doesn’t clear whatever ambiguity is slowing them down. Expecting exhausted people to rest, while leaving the structure that burned them out fully intact is like telling the person who is drowning to just start breathing as they slip underwater.

A Holistic Approach to Organizational Pain

So if inverse pressure isn’t the most effective path to solving the problem, what is? That got us thinking about the nature of problems and solutions, and how often the best long term solution is less about simply alleviating the symptoms and more about finding a root cause.

Naturally, thinking about pain got us thinking about the human body. It turns out, we can learn a lot about how to address organizational pain by learning from how we deal with pain in the human body.

For instance, we know that pain in one part of the human body can often be alleviated through how we deal with another part of the body.

• A persistent headache could be a neck problem.
• Chronic back pain might trace back to how you’re walking.
• Fatigue could be due to something hormonal, nutrition, or sleep.

It’s through our understanding of how interconnected everything is, rather than approaching pain as an isolated phenomenon, that we find our best remedies. Further, it’s this deeper understanding that helps us avoid catastrophe. Left arm numbness could be from sleeping in a weird position but it could also be an early warning sign of a heart attack. It’s pretty important to know which it is.

The same logic applies to the inversion trap. Organizations often ignore the signals and push forward instead of doing a life-saving diagnostic.

The Solution: Pressure Points

After looking at each of the 6 pain points, and writing down every possible solution we could think of, we saw another clear pattern emerge. We call them The Pressure Points.

We grouped all of the solutions and found that just four root factors could explain organizations that were healthy and high-performing or failing and broken.

Here are the four pressure points:

Clarity

This is what people actually know and believe about the plan, their role, and what matters most.

Collaboration

This is how people genuinely work together. It includes the trust, the communication, the sense of belonging, the ability to disagree and move forward anyway.

Utilization

This is whether the right people are doing the right work at the right time, with a workload that’s sustainable rather than quietly crushing them.

Systems

This is about the tools, processes, and structures and organization has in place or is putting in place. Does it all actually fit the work and the team or is it adding friction to every step?

Why This Matters Beyond Productivity

The Pressure Points framework is built to make visible the connection between the pain and the root cause. When any of the pressure points are ignored or break down, you will feel one or more of the 6 pains outlined above.

When organizations fail to properly diagnose and treat their pain, real people carry the weight of that. They absorb the blame for systemic failures they didn’t create. They burn out trying to outwork a structure that was never going to reward the effort. They eventually leave –– taking their knowledge, their relationships, and their potential with them.

Like I said in the beginning, this isn’t about whether we get more output with flat or decreasing labor costs. The real value of this work is that in addition to productivity gains, we finally understand how to build workplaces where people can genuinely do their best work, and where the company succeeds because of that –– not in spite of it. Those two things don’t have to be in tension.

In fact, the evidence tends to suggest you can’t have one without the other, at least not for long.

The Next Four Posts

This is the first in a series of five posts.

Over the next four, I’m going to dive deeper into each pressure point –– what it tends to look like when it’s working, what it looks like when it’s broken, and how it could be showing up as one or more of the six pains in your organization.

For now, the most important shift is this: stop treating the pain where you feel it, and start asking where the pressure actually needs to go.

If you want to start mapping your own organization’s pain to the pressure points driving it, you can learn more about the framework and take the risk-free diagnostic with us at getsuperproductive.com/pressure-points.

I hope you enjoyed this post!

If you liked this post, then you will LOVE my newsletter (The Infinite Impact)
and my learning community (The Superhero Institute).