Molly Graham’s Post

Moar tips on how to debug issues on your team over here: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-debug-a-team-that-isnt-working

Yessss. Teams adapt to what you do not what you say. People will be trained by the behavior they see over and over again. So if the leaders are overturning decisions, lower management won’t make decisions themselves. And then senior management wants to know why everything is being brought to them. There are so many examples of teams, managers, individuals, and leaders adapting to the behaviors they see. It’s about diagnosing the root cause. Not the end behavior.

This is the part most leaders skip when they talk about empowered teams. They announce the new operating model. They say the words. Then they insert themselves at the last decision, question the last output, and wonder why the team keeps escalating. Teams are rational. They read the environment accurately. If the cost of being wrong is high, they'll optimize to avoid being wrong — not to move fast. The leader who says "I want speed" while creating a low-trust environment doesn't have a team problem. They have a mirror problem.

"Teams adapt to what you do, not what you say." This is the most underdiagnosed founder problem I see. The founder genuinely believes the team is the constraint. The team is actually just responding rationally to the environment the founder built. What makes it hard to fix is that the evidence always seems to confirm the founder's read. Team escalates → founder steps in → team escalates more. The loop is self-sealing. The only way out is for the founder to get an accurate picture of their own behavior, not how they think they're showing up, but how the team is actually reading them week to week. That gap between intention and impact is usually where the slowness lives.

Yes this. Every company has two cultures: The aspirational one.And the one operationalized through the founders' everyday behaviors.

facts. ownership = fast decision rights. + its a trust issue. if you keep double checking their work you either have not hired the right people, or there is absolutely no trust they can actually do the job well enough, which is where that mirror comes in handy.

I've always found that teams mirror the image they see, so a stressful leader who doesn't know what they want and constantly asks people to put out one fire after the other...will get stressed out teams that don't know how to prioritize and more importantly, don't know why they're working on what they're working on.

The cycle is brutal because it's self-justifying. The founder second-guesses a call, the team starts escalating everything to avoid being wrong, decisions slow down - and the founder reads that slowness as proof the team can't be trusted, so they insert themselves even more. They built the exact behavior they're frustrated by, and the evidence keeps confirming they were right to step in.

This reminds me of trying to merge onto a highway while someone keeps yanking the wheel every few seconds “to help.” Eventually people stop building momentum and start optimizing for safety instead. Teams pay attention to the behavioral weather system around them far more than the stated goal.

I find this is often a distance issue. When those same leaders are in the room with the people getting the work done they realise things do take longer than they imagined from the outside. This is why curiosity is a great leadership skill. Rather than stopping at “the team are slow”, curiosity leads you to realise why that is and crucially, that it’s often not a people problem.