The businesses most at risk are often the busiest ones

A recent Microsoft Work Trend Index report has revealed that employees are interrupted every two minutes on average by meetings, emails or messages. But the bigger issue is not just interruption. It is what all that activity may be hiding: slow decision-making, poor alignment and stalled execution.

For Dori Moreno – a growth strategist specialising in the development of individuals, teams and businesses – this reflects a deeper leadership issue she is seeing more frequently inside growing organisations and leadership teams.

“I’m seeing leadership teams confuse motion with progress,” she says. “Everyone is busy. Meetings are full. WhatsApps and emails are constant. There is no shortage of effort. But when you ask simple questions like: What are we actually trying to move forward? What are the priorities? Who owns the decision? What has been agreed? The answers are often far less clear than the activity suggests.”

According to Moreno, many businesses are operating in a state of constant movement without a clear enough strategy underneath it. The result is activity without alignment: organisations that appear productive on the surface, while internally struggling with unclear ownership, reactive decision-making and effort that does not always move the business forward.

“Leaders are so busy doing that they are not thinking. They are solving operational issues, sitting in meetings, dealing with inefficiencies and firefighting problems that should often sit elsewhere in the business. They are facilitating activity, but not necessarily facilitating growth.”

This is especially common in founder-led and organically grown businesses, particularly SMEs that have scaled successfully through instinct, speed and operational involvement. While that approach can drive growth in the early stages, Moreno says many businesses eventually reach a point where the same leadership habits that helped them grow begin limiting the next phase of expansion.

“A business can grow organically for a long time because of the founder’s energy, instinct, experience and involvement. But eventually, the founder is still making too many decisions and sitting at the centre of too many processes. In many cases, they are the business and the business is them. But at a certain stage, the founder has to start seeing the business as its own entity, with its own systems, leadership capacity and future.”

Moreno says the problem is often misdiagnosed as workload, poor communication or underperformance, when the real issue is a lack of strategic clarity and leadership alignment.

She adds that the pattern is often reinforced when businesses promote strong operators into leadership roles without helping them shift into true people leadership. “Many people are promoted because they are excellent at the work,” she says. “But being operationally strong does not automatically mean someone can build alignment, manage people, create ownership or enable growth. They often continue doing what made them successful before, while the team around them remains dependent.

“Leaders often say things like: ‘The team is overwhelmed,’ or ‘People are not taking ownership,’ or ‘We need better communication.’ Those things may be true, but they are often symptoms rather than causes. The team cannot take ownership if ownership has not been clearly defined. Communication cannot improve if decisions are not properly closed, and performance cannot stabilise if priorities keep changing.”

Moreno says this lack of clarity tends to show up first in priorities, decision-making, ownership and culture.

“Everything starts becoming important, which means nothing really is. Decisions get reopened repeatedly because people are not sure where their responsibility starts and ends. What many organisations call culture is often just language on a wall. Real culture is what people experience in decisions, accountability, feedback, conflict and behaviour under pressure.”

The issue becomes even more visible during periods of uncertainty. Moreno explains that external pressure often pushes leadership teams into reactive behaviour, where immediate problems consume all available attention and longer term thinking disappears.

“When things become difficult, leaders can become completely fixated on solving the immediate crisis. If panic starts shaping the business, people become anxious, decisions become reactive and the organisation loses the ability to think clearly. The issue is not always poor planning. It is often poor strategic discipline under pressure.”

For teams on the ground, the consequences of these reactions have a knock-on effect. “People can handle hard work better than they can handle unclear work. What drains people is not only the volume of work but the constant uncertainty around what matters, what has changed, who is responsible, and whether today’s instruction will still apply tomorrow.”

She recently worked with a business of more than 100 employees where the problem was not disengagement or lack of effort, but too much energy being spent compensating for unclear systems and informal ways of working. “People cared deeply about the business and were working hard, but much of that effort was being used to navigate uncertainty instead of moving the business forward. The issue was alignment, not commitment.”

Moreno believes many leadership teams need to confront an uncomfortable possibility: effort is not always the problem.

“A busy team is not necessarily an aligned team. Activity can hide a lack of direction for a long time. Good numbers can hide it, too. And that is the real risk for many businesses right now. They are mistaking movement for momentum and productivity for progress.

“At some point, they have to stop asking whether people are working hard enough and start asking whether the business is actually clear enough for that work to lead anywhere meaningful.”