Lindsay is the co-founder of Vega Factor and co-author of bestselling book, Primed to Perform: How to Build the Highest Performing Cultures Through the Science of Total Motivation. Previously, Lindsay led projects at McKinsey & Company, working with large Fortune 500 companies, non-profits, universities, and school systems.
Lindsay received her B.A. from Princeton and an MBA from Harvard. In her spare time, she loves investigating and sharing great stories.
Leaders today often face an infuriating paradox: all their employees seem busy and the organization is moving too slowly. Is the issue your people, or is the issue your management system and ways of working?
Answer these 8 questions as an executive team to figure out if your management system needs changing before you fire everyone.
At a recent offsite, a CEO said to me: "Our company is like a slow-moving bus full of frantic kids – lots of energy and movement inside, but the bus itself is barely inching along."
This sentiment is all too common. In just the last few weeks, we heard executives and CEOs describe this as:
Leaders today often face an infuriating paradox: all their employees seem busy AND the organization is moving too slowly.
Is the issue your people, or is the issue your management system and ways of working?
Answer these 8 questions as an executive team to figure out if your management system needs changing before you fire everyone.
Imagine you're driving a car down a winding road. Imagine on both sides are dangerous cliffs. Now imagine you can only touch the steering wheel once every ten minutes? How fast will you drive the car? What if you were blindfolded?
This simple story is one that shows up across machines, people, teams, and companies. Namely, an organization's speed is a function of the frequency and quality of its feedback loops.
When you cannot see or course correct, the feedback loop isn't effective.
In today's complex companies, there are a few feedback loops that matter.
Loop 1: The creative, or "figuring it out," loop is where organizations set direction. It involves two steps:
Visioning is collaborative. It requires surfacing together. Exploring is individual. It requires diving alone.
Loop 2: When these two steps result in a direction, companies need to shift to the execution, or "getting it done" loop. This loop also has two steps:
Galvanizing is also surfacing as a team and collective in nature. Achieving is diving, and individual in nature.
Loop 3: Once we've achieved and have a read from the market, we start again with visioning.
Organizations that run these loops quickly and effectively consistently outperform. When these loops break, they succumb to the innovator's dilemma and stop adapting to their changing markets.
In many organizations, these loops are poorly defined and managed. Market-driven feedback is slow, unclear, or non-existent. Teams get stuck in one phase, skip crucial steps, or lack the technology and habits to transition effectively. This friction, lack of feedback, and resulting bureaucracy are major causes of perceived slowness, even when people are trying hard.
The companies that create sustainably high levels of motivation and performance make sure they run the right performance habits in each team, with real accountability. To do so, they operationalize VEGA loops through 8 habits.
This 8-question diagnostic uses these habits to see what might be making your company slow.
For each question, answer honestly about your team or organization. Give yourself 1 point for a "Yes" (this area supports faster velocity) and 0 points for a "No" (this area is likely contributing to slower velocity). Your total score (out of 8) can indicate the health of your management system.
Visioning - Are we pointed in the right direction?
Tally up your "Yes" answers from the 8 questions. Your score (out of 8) is a rough indicator of how healthy your organizational system is and how well it supports velocity.
How to improve your velocity: revamping your cadences
Okay, so you've gone through the 8 questions and maybe you've spotted some areas where your system is slowing things down. That's the first big step knowing where the drag is happening. The next part is figuring out how to fix it and actually speed things up.
Remember how we talked about velocity being a function of your feedback loops? The best way to improve those loops is by getting your organizational cadence right. Think about the rhythm of how work gets reviewed, discussed, and adjusted across the company.
There are really two main rhythms that matter most for knowledge work:
Your triannual cadences should have three steps where the goal is to create clarity and motivation to execute the right priorities.
The first step is the cascading Strategy Check. The purpose of this cascade is for everyone to leave with clarity on their main growth priority. Some companies call this their "p-zero priority". When done well, teams leave excited with a good set of priorities to drive toward the organization's vision.
The second step is the Habit Check. The best leading indicator we've found to see if a team will execute its strategy well is to see if they are motivated to do so. The Habit Check does this and better still helps the team figure out how to improve.
The third step is the Skill Check. Almost always, teams lack critical skills to fully execute their growth strategies. The Skill Check helps to preemptively agree on the skills each colleague can practice while driving their strategy forward. This helps to build more confidence and less imposter syndrome.
We've found through a lot of experimentation that half yearly cascades are too slow, but quarterly are too fast. Triannual (or every four months) is just right.
The Factor.AI platform provides AI agents to every team to help them execute these cadences in ways that are fun, fast, and freakishly high performing.
When I was a young manager, I used to hide my and my team's work from my leaders. I wanted to impress them with our work, but I ended up constantly disappointing them and encouraging micromanagement from them.
One day, I told my boss I thought he was a micromanager. He said to me, that as a leader, my job is to keep the whole team on the same page. By not doing so, I'm forcing him to micromanage just to figure out what's going on.
He was right.
From there on, I would write a weekly reflection for my leadership. This included three major sections:
In the operating models we implement we not only require these kinds of Weekly Reflections, but we use Factor's cutting edge AI to help.
Implementing this cadence has never been easier at this point. With a willing executive team, we can drive this change in a way that is turnkey and deeply inspiring for your talent.
Feeling like your organization is moving slowly is a common challenge, especially in today's dynamic environment where high velocity is key to navigating volatility.
However, the root cause is rarely just individual employees "slacking off." More often, it's a signal that the organizational system the poorly managed VEGA loops and inadequate feedback mechanisms needs attention.
By using the VEGA framework and asking these 8 diagnostic questions, leaders can shift from potentially blaming individuals to identifying and addressing the systemic issues that are truly creating drag.
Factor.AI's integrated tools: Strategy Checks, Habit Checks, Skill Checks, and Weekly Reflections, and Coaching Guides offer practical, built-in ways to implement the VEGA principles, helping you diagnose problems, improve team habits, and ensure effective execution through better feedback loops and cadence.
Use these questions and tools to foster clarity, remove roadblocks, and build an organization that doesn't just work hard, but works smart and fast, achieving true velocity in the face of volatility.
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