Your Team Isn't Lazy. Something Is Getting in Their Way.

When a leader tells me their team is not productive, the first thing they usually reach for is effort: get people to work harder, put in more hours, care more. In more than 35 years leading teams across Durham Region and the Greater Toronto Area, at organizations including Honeywell, Johnson Controls, and Armstrong Fluid Technology, I have almost never found that to be the real problem. Your people are not lazy. Far more often, something in the way you run the work is getting in their way, and no amount of extra effort will fix an obstacle that leadership has left in place.

If your team is already putting in long hours without the results to show for it, that is a related but distinct problem, and I have written separately about why long hours do not equal productivity. This article is about the flip side: the specific obstacles that quietly drain a team's output, and what a leader does to remove them. Because that, not pushing harder, is how you actually make a team more productive.

Why Team Productivity Is Really a Leadership Problem

The evidence that productivity is driven from the top is strong. Gallup's long-running meta-analysis found that the most engaged teams are 17% more productive than the least engaged, along with being more profitable and having far lower absenteeism. And engagement itself is a leadership outcome: Gallup found that managers account for 70% of the variance in a team's engagement. Put those together and the message is clear: the single biggest lever on your team's productivity is not your people's willingness to work, it is how the work is led.

Think about where a typical day's productivity actually goes. It leaks away in unclear priorities that send people in five directions, in meetings that could have been an email, in the constant interruptions that make deep focus impossible, and in rework caused by a process that was broken upstream. None of those is a failure of effort. Every one of them is something a leader can fix. That is genuinely good news, because it means the productivity you are missing is largely within your control.

How to Improve Team Productivity: Remove What's in the Way

Here is the approach I would take, drawn from years of operational leadership and the same principles behind Lean, the discipline of systematically removing waste from how work gets done. Notice that almost every step is about clearing obstacles, not adding pressure.

1. Give ruthless clarity on priorities. When everything is a priority, nothing is. Name the few things that truly matter this quarter and make them unmistakable, so your people can stop spreading their effort thin and put it where it counts. Focus is the highest-leverage productivity decision a leader makes.
2. Protect focus time. Deep, uninterrupted work is where real output happens, and it is exactly what most workplaces destroy with back-to-back meetings and constant pings. Cut the meetings that do not need to exist, shorten the rest, and protect blocks of time where your people can actually concentrate.
3. Kill the multitasking myth. Switching constantly between tasks feels productive but quietly wrecks output, because every switch carries a mental cost and work done in fragments is slower and lower in quality. Help your team focus on one important thing at a time rather than juggling ten.
4. Cut the waste and rework. A great deal of lost productivity is not slow work, it is redoing work that was done wrong the first time because the process or the brief was flawed. This is the heart of Lean and Six Sigma: find where effort is being wasted and fix the process so it does not happen again.
5. Clear the obstacles. One of your core jobs as a leader is to remove what is blocking your people: the missing information, the slow approval, the tool that does not work, the decision only you can make. Ask your team what is getting in their way, then go clear it. That single habit unlocks more than any productivity app.
6. Match people to their strengths. People are faster, better, and more energized doing work that fits what they are naturally good at. Where you can, shape roles and assignments around each person's strengths rather than forcing everyone through the same mold.
7. Get the team aligned. A team pulling in the same direction wastes far less effort than one where everyone is optimizing their own corner. Getting your leadership team aligned around shared goals removes the friction and duplicated work that quietly drain productivity.

What Should I Be Honest With Myself About?

Let me be straight about a few things, because productivity is surrounded by quick fixes that do not work. First, you cannot squeeze your way to lasting productivity. Pushing an already-stretched team harder produces a short burst followed by burnout, mistakes, and turnover, which leaves you worse off than before. If your team is working long hours without results, more hours is the opposite of the answer, as I cover in the piece on long hours and productivity.

Now the honest caveats. Tools and apps will not fix a productivity problem on their own; a new piece of software laid over unclear priorities and broken processes just adds another thing to manage. The real work is leadership and process, not technology. Some productivity loss is also structural: if you are genuinely understaffed or your systems are broken, no focus technique overcomes that, and you have to fix the underlying constraint. And be careful what you measure, because rewarding visible busyness rather than real outcomes trains people to look productive instead of being productive. Getting all of this right is a leadership skill, and it is what we help develop. If you want to build it in yourself and your team, the practical next step is a straightforward conversation, and it pairs with our guide on how to develop better leaders. You can also learn more about Malcolm Gurley and why organizations choose Gurley Leadership Solutions.