Your “People Problem” is a Platform Problem in Disguise 🥸

There is a pervasive, expensive myth circulating in leadership circles today. It’s the idea that if your team is disengaged, slow, or “burnt out,” you have a culture problem. You’re told you need better “buy-in,” more accountability, or perhaps a team-building retreat to realign your values.

That’s a distraction

As a leader, you are the architect of your team’s environment. And right now, most are forcing their elite talent to work inside a digital obstacle course. When you ask a high-performer to navigate 40 different logins, manual data-entry loops, and fragmented Slack threads just to complete a single client task, you aren’t just losing time.

You are wasting your most precious asset: Human Cognitive Bandwidth.

➡️ If Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast, Friction Eats Culture for Lunch ⬅️

We’ve been taught that culture is the “software” of the organization. But the truth is, Friction—the technical and procedural resistance in your daily operations—is the “hardware” that culture is forced to run on.

No amount of “ownership” talk survives a tech stack that makes it impossible to own anything. Your “disengaged” employees aren’t lazy; they are suffering from Digital Fragmentation. They are exhausted from fighting the tools that were promised to help them.

3 Insights into the People/Platform Whirlwind

1️⃣ The Cognitive Switching Tax
Every time an employee jumps from your CRM to a spreadsheet, then to a project tool, then back to email, they pay a “switching tax.” Research shows it can take up to 20 minutes to regain deep focus after a distraction.
2️⃣ The 40-Login Barrier
If employees often send quick messages to request data instead of using your $50k platform, it indicates your platform has failed. Difficult-to-use tools lead users to bypass them, creating shadow systems such as sticky notes and private messages that obscure the truth.
3️⃣ The Resentment Loop
High-performing employees don’t quit jobs; they quit management and poor leadership. They also leave systems that undermine their confidence.

💰 The Gold Nugget: The “One-Window” Audit

Tomorrow morning, I want you to perform a simple, zero-cost diagnostic. Pick one standard, recurring task in your business—like onboarding a client or generating a report. Ask a team member to perform it while you watch.

Count how many different browser tabs or applications they have to open to finish that one task If the count is more than three, you don’t have a “People Problem.” You have an architecture problem. Every tab beyond the third is a leak in your profit margin and a crack in your culture.

“A bad system will beat a good person every time.” — W. Edwards Deming