A CEO once said something to me at the end of a strategy session that I’ve never forgotten.
He leaned back in his chair, looked around the room at his leadership team, and said:
"I feel like we made more progress in the last six hours than we made in the last six months trying to do this on our own."
Everyone laughed.
But it wasn’t really a joke.
His team wasn’t lazy.
They weren’t disengaged.
They weren’t lacking intelligence or effort.
In fact, they were doing everything most leadership and management books recommend.
They had goals.
They had meetings.
They had accountability.
They even had a great culture.
And yet something wasn’t clicking.
If you spend enough time inside leadership teams, you start to notice something surprising:
The problems organizations face are predictable.
But the solutions leaders try first are almost never the ones that ultimately solve them.
At System & Soul, we’ve now coached 4,000+ organizations across dozens of industries.
Across those companies, we’ve seen measurable results like:
You can explore more stories and outcomes here:
Despite the diversity of companies we work with, the underlying leadership challenges are remarkably consistent.
At System & Soul, we’ve coached leaders in companies ranging from startups to multi-generational businesses and enterprises.
Different industries.
Different sizes.
Different personalities.
And yet the struggles leaders describe are strikingly similar.
When organizations bring us in, the challenges almost always fall into three categories.
Most leadership teams believe they’re clear on their strategy, priorities, and direction. It’s usually only when they experience real clarity that they realize how much ambiguity they were operating with.
The team is working hard, but not always in the same direction.
Everyone is busy.
Everyone is committed.
BUT, everyone has a different way of doing things, different platforms they use, and different ways of communicating to one another.
But priorities are fuzzy and alignment requires constant effort from leadership.
Strategy lives in conversations and closed-door meetings instead of systems that make strategy known, shared, and easy to execute on.
Execution becomes reactive instead of intentional–and it’s either painfully slow or painfully disjointed.
We end up either:
Heather Fortner, CEO of SignatureFD, described this dynamic in her organization before they implemented a framework. Their company had grown into a complex enterprise, but their leadership model hadn’t evolved with it.
“Our organization was driven by consensus. Every decision required all four of us to agree before taking it to the advisory board—and then we’d have to get them aligned too. It slowed everything down.”
Signature FD Case Study Transcr…
Without a clear structure for decision-making, even talented leaders can find themselves stuck.
Heather explained that each leader was holding both their personal perspective and what they believed was best for the organization. Those two things were often in tension, and without a framework to navigate that tension, progress stalled.
“Something good for the organization might not feel good for the individual, and without clear governance, we didn’t have a way to navigate those tensions.”
The result wasn’t bad leadership.
It was unclear leadership architecture.
Metrics exist. (We have spreadsheets for our spreadsheets.)
Goals exist. (Shoot for the moon, right?)
Meetings exist. (And we don’t need any more of them.)
But accountability still feels off.
If we enforce it too much, it feels mechanical.
If we’re casual about it, it feels like one more thing on the to-do list.
People are doing the best they can, right?
This often creates a subtle but dangerous pattern.
Leaders become the engine of momentum instead of the organization itself.
Accountability becomes a way to manage failure instead of empowering individual thinking and action.
And ultimately, leaders spend enormous energy pushing the system forward instead of the system helping the team move forward.
Instead of clarity creating confidence, it creates hesitation and frustration.
But here’s the part many leaders miss:
Accountability isn’t just about people.
It’s about the system that those people are working inside of.
If the system doesn’t clearly define priorities, roles, and decision rights, then the system itself is quietly failing the people trying to operate within it.
In other words, individuals aren’t the only ones accountable.
The system has to carry accountability too.
When the structure is right, people naturally step into ownership.
When it’s not, even great employees hesitate.
One leadership team we worked with at Bobcat of the Rockies, a large equipment dealership, described a moment that made this problem obvious.
During a busy season, an employee received a call from a customer wanting to buy a piece of equipment — a bucket attachment worth about $1,200.
Instead of simply selling it, the employee called an operations manager at their corporate office to ask if it was okay.
Which might sound small.
But in a business that literally sells buckets every day, this kind of hesitation revealed something deeper was happening.
As one of the leaders explained, decisions that used to be made confidently on the front lines were now being escalated up the chain.
“Instead of just selling it or going to a supervisor, someone called one of our ops managers to ask if they could sell a $1,200 bucket. And that’s when we realized decisions that used to be made without phone calls had slowly shifted upward.”
Nothing about the employee’s role had changed.
What had changed was the level of ownership and autonomy they felt.
As the organization grew:
Roles became less clear.
Decision rights blurred.
People stopped feeling confident about what they owned.
And when that happens, accountability quietly turns into compliance.
People still work hard.
But instead of owning outcomes, they begin waiting for direction — and feeling frustrated that their work is managed through a microscope.
When the system finally clarified who owns what and how decisions should be made, something important shifted.
Frontline leaders regained confidence.
Managers stopped being the bottleneck.
And accountability returned to where it belongs — distributed throughout the organization instead of concentrated at the top.
Lots of companies have values, leadership training, and development plans.
But those values and training programs don’t necessarily enter into real decisions, ongoing behavior, or leadership expectations. They get relegated to HR as things we should do, not habits that reinforce how we operate.
I’ll give you a real example. Several years ago I was working inside a very “culture-focused” organization. We took a whole day out of the office to do team-building exercises at a day camp. One of our exercises that day was to transfer heavy buckets of water from one side of a creek to another using only a rope. This sounds very Survivor, I know.
I did notice something very telling about my organization as we worked out how to solve this problem. Our top leaders jumped in, made a plan, and painstakingly sent one unlucky intern back and forth across the rope to retrieve each bucket. Something tells me we didn’t get the challenge done in the time we were given, but I honestly can't remember. The entire time they were doing this, there were ten other capable people standing around waiting to be useful. It makes me wonder how that could have looked different with everyone involved. Weren’t we there to build a team? Also, for the record, that intern did not return next summer.
Back at the office, I saw the same thing. We preached teamwork and a collaborative culture, but when it came to making big moves and decisions, it always landed (behind closed doors) with two or three top people.
Culture becomes a marketing message instead of a system for how things get done.
Do the big buckets of water in the business get from one side of the creek to the other? Sure. But maybe we make it harder than it needs to be. And maybe it creates a subculture we never intended.
When companies start experiencing these pains, they almost always try to solve them the same way.
They go searching for a better system.
A new framework.
A new methodology.
A new set of rules for “how we do things around here.”
It makes sense.
Adding structure feels like the logical answer to discord and inefficiency.
But many leaders approach it like buying a dozen eggs and hoping one of them eventually hatches a chicken.
“Maybe this system will fix it.”
“Maybe this one will.”
“Maybe if we run more meetings, track more metrics, or install a new process, things will finally click.”
And sometimes they do improve.
Systems can absolutely bring clarity, accountability, and strategic focus to an organization.
But over time many leaders notice something surprising.
The structure works.
But the energy doesn’t change.
People still hesitate to take ownership.
Teams still rely heavily on a few leaders to create momentum.
Values and our stated cultural attributes still struggle to move from aspiration to behavior.
That’s when leaders begin asking a different question.
Maybe the answer isn’t just a better system.
Maybe the answer is better leadership.
Over the last few decades, another wave of thinking has shaped modern management.
Leadership development.
Emotional intelligence.
Psychological safety.
Employee engagement.
Purpose-driven work.
The idea behind this movement is simple:
If we develop people well enough, the business will thrive.
And there’s truth in that.
The evolution of management thinking has steadily moved toward understanding people — not just processes.
But here’s the tension leaders eventually encounter.
Even the most thoughtful, emotionally intelligent leaders struggle to drive results if the organization around them lacks structure.
You can have a team full of thoughtful, engaged, values-driven people…
…but if priorities aren’t clear, metrics aren’t visible, and decision-making processes aren’t defined, the work still stalls.
Great leadership without structure creates inspiration.
But not always execution.
Eventually, leadership teams arrive at the same realization:
They need both.
Systems and leader development.
Clarity and ownership.
This is why business operating systems have become so popular in the last two or three decades.
They bring discipline:
For organizations that previously operated on instinct or by the tremendous willpower of one or two leaders, these systems can be transformative. There’s massive relief for the people who’ve carried the weight of the business and the people who were suffering the chaos of it.
But over time, another pattern often appears.
The system works best when it starts at the leadership level, but the impact and adoption weaken the further you are from the top of the hierarchy.
Maybe managers follow the process but may not feel ownership of the bigger picture.
Frontline teams see the metrics but don’t always feel connected to why they matter.
Values may exist, but they sit beside the operating system rather than inside it.
And when that happens, the system slowly becomes mechanical.
Meetings happen because they’re required.
Metrics are tracked because they’re expected.
But the deeper ownership that drives exceptional performance never fully takes hold.
That had us asking a new question:
What would it look like if the system was fully energized by the soul?
After years of building companies and coaching leadership teams, Benj and I noticed something important.
Organizations that experienced real transformation had something deeper happening beneath the surface.
They had energy. Not motivational energy. Not energy that fanned out.
Organizational energy.
People understood the identity of the company.
They felt connected to the vision.
They took responsibility for outcomes.
They delegated well and made decisions that aligned with the bigger picture.
Not because they were told to.
But because they believed in the work.
They didn’t serve the system, the system served them.
And the people, as the soul of the organization, found ownership.
The structure that creates clarity, accountability, and execution.
The FUEL that feeds the system.
The shared identity, values, and ownership that energize the work.
Without systems, organizations drift.
Without soul, systems become mechanical.
And mechanical systems eventually lose the very thing they were meant to create:
ownership.
If there’s one lesson we’ve learned from working with thousands of companies, it’s this:
Most organizations don’t struggle because their people lack intelligence or effort.
They struggle because their system and their people never fully connect.
If you’re evaluating how your organization runs, ask these questions.
Every team and individual should understand:
The best operating systems don’t just organize work—they reinforce what the organization stands for and serve the leaders who show up.
In many companies, purpose and values live in a separate conversation from execution. They’re discussed during retreats, written on the website, or introduced during onboarding, but they don’t consistently shape decisions, priorities, or leadership behavior.
A healthy system closes that gap.
The real test of a leadership system is what happens when the leader leaves the room.
Do people move the work forward with confidence or do they shrink back?
Healthy organizations create leadership at every level.
Not just at the top.
If you look at the history of management, the evolution is clear.
Early business leaders solved the problem of efficiency.
Later thinkers focused on structure and accountability.
More recently, we’ve learned how much leadership, trust, and engagement matter.
Each era added an important piece of the puzzle.
But the future of work won’t belong to companies that choose one side.
It will belong to organizations that integrate both.
Structure that creates clarity.
Culture that creates dignity and collective purpose.
Systems that drive execution.
People who are invited and engaged to bring the system to life.
Because great companies aren’t powered by systems alone. They are energized by SOUL.
They’re powered by people who believe in the work enough to make the system come alive.
Personally, I find that leading a high-growth company can be exhilarating when you have the right structure in place.
But without it, it’s isolating, exhausting, and unsustainable.
Because let's be honest.
If you're the founder, everyone is asking you questions and expecting you to have all the answers all the time.
But what about the difficult questions you have as you scale?
The strategic decisions that keep you up at night.
The feeling that you're the only one who can see where the company needs to go.
This is where System & Soul comes in.
Running a scaling company often feels like everyone expects you to figure it out alone.
But what if you didn’t have to?
System & Soul transforms founder-led chaos into senior leadership team execution with clear structure and intentional culture.
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