Most leaders want projects to get done faster, issues to be resolved quicker, and outcomes to be realized sooner. They want faster execution. Who doesn’t?
The reality is that many times projects stall, issues get escalated, people wait, meetings multiply, and outcomes lag.
The culprits we often point out are accountability, communication, and even a lack of urgency.
But there is a deeper reason that often gets overlooked: people don’t believe they’re allowed to carry the ball themselves.
How can you tell this is happening?
- Every disagreement gets escalated
- People ask permission for routine decisions
- Meetings become approval-seeking exercises
- Managers become traffic cops
- Leaders complain they’re overwhelmed while simultaneously requiring every decision to come through them
These conditions often emerge when leaders:
- Reverse decisions
- Step in and take over too quickly
- Solve problems and issues without giving people time to resolve them themselves
- Criticize decisions that didn’t work out
The problem isn’t always accountability, communication, or a lack of urgency. Sometimes, it’s that people haven’t been given what they need to carry the ball confidently.
What they need is Belief, one of the Four Collaboration Passes.
Belief is the confidence that someone can carry responsibility, make decisions, solve problems, and move work forward.
Without Belief, people will hesitate to make decisions, escalate more than they should, and schedule more meetings to build consensus instead of clarity.
Passing belief means behaving in ways that give them confidence to carry the ball forward.
Here is what it looks like practically:
- Saying out loud that you believe in and trust them, not just in your head.
- Not taking the ball back too quickly when something goes awry.
- Not rescuing people from issues and disagreements too quickly, giving them space to work through them themselves.
- Formally telling them you trust them to make decisions.
- Standing by them after mistakes or decisions that didn’t work out, treating them as learning opportunities instead of confidence-degraders.
Belief doesn’t mean abandoning clarity. In fact, clarity is a required ingredient. People move faster when they know the outcomes they’re responsible for, the decisions they own, and where the boundaries are. Belief works best when paired with clarity.
When people know what they’re responsible for and believe they’re trusted to act, execution accelerates.
Faster execution doesn’t happen when leaders make more decisions. It happens when more people are confident carrying the ball forward.
The fastest organizations aren’t dependent on a few people. They’re filled with people who know they’re trusted to carry the ball forward.
And when that happens, teams don’t just move faster. They move forward as one team.
