Layers of Progress
Lately, I’ve been having a lot of conversations with clients about the nature of progress and the true outcomes of their work. A recurring theme is the frustration they feel when work seems to boil down to a relentless cycle of task completion. It’s a strange irony: the more efficient their teams become at checking off tasks, the more tasks pile up. They feel trapped in this endless loop, disconnected from any greater purpose. Even when the tasks themselves are challenging and rewarding, both they and their teams crave something more meaningful. We spent time exploring how to infuse this "task-completion treadmill" with a deeper sense of meaning and purpose.
As a manager, your very thought process and actions are geared toward demonstrating that you and your team are moving forward. Yet, the corporate and industry landscape is often built to heavily reward task completion, eclipsing other vital elements of work like impact and connection. This intense focus on visible progress shapes—and is shaped by—your leadership approach. I want to dive into the different, layered ways we define progress and examine the leadership consequences of each.
Layer 1 - Resources
Being a manager often feels like a non-stop war over resources. You’re either fighting to secure more, staunchly defending what you have, or making the painful choices about who or what to cut. Resources mean people, budget, space, and time. This constant pressure around allocation inevitably dictates your leadership style. Thinking back to countless budget meetings, the collective leadership talent in the room often seemed to dissolve into a scene from Survivor. To get the investment we felt our teams desperately needed, we ratcheted up our competitive instincts. Maybe we tried rational, evidence-based arguments (which rarely worked), pleaded an emotional case (which sometimes did), or aligned ourselves with the room's power brokers (the most effective, seemingly). Outside of budget season, we continued to frame our leadership around resources, prioritizing work that justified current needs or built a strong case for future investment. We hoped the next budget cycle would find us either showcasing stellar success with current resources (warranting more investment) or revealing critical failures only solvable with more investment. And sometimes, managers would confusingly try to argue both.
I recall only one budget process in all my years that truly forced managers to tap into a wider, more mature range of leadership skills. Our senior executive set a firm cap on new hires and tasked her direct reports—us—with collectively deciding how those limited positions would be allocated. Initially, it was the same old song and dance: everyone pleaded their individual case. When that went nowhere, we collectively shifted tactics. We agreed to set aside our own departmental needs and dedicate time to understanding the needs of others. This forced a move from a competitive mindset to a collaborative one. It demanded better communication, deep listening, empathy, and stronger relationships within the group. Though it took longer, the outcome was superior—both in terms of allocation and leadership development. Critically, we also started making forward-looking decisions about future needs and resource sharing, which began to build trust and mutual understanding. Even though I didn’t get everything my team needed, I felt heard, understood, and supported for the future, which made tackling the present much easier. This success hinged on the assumption that this collaborative approach was the new norm. Unfortunately, it was a one-time experiment. The following year, the executive reclaimed the decision-making power. We not only reverted to our competitive ways, we became more aggressive. The core leadership lesson here is stark: when your organization defines progress through resource and investment focus, you create a leadership culture that is competitive, short-term oriented, and possesses a dangerously narrow definition of success.
Layer 2 - Process
When facing an organizational challenge, the first solution we reach for is often resources and investment. Right behind that, and often intertwined, is process improvement. Organizations happily invest, especially when it targets a process promising to fix a problem or seize an opportunity. When our progress is questioned, managers reflexively cite a lack of investment or a flaw in the process—and we're quick to blame a process flaw that belongs to another team or person. When we set out to fix our own processes, we meticulously define steps, clarify roles and responsibilities, and, if we’re being thorough, bake in metrics, feedback loops, and adjustment mechanisms. And yes, process improvement does drive progress.
The leadership skills essential for good process design are systems thinking and the ability to see connections. You must be able to grasp the desired outcome and ensure everyone else grasps it, too. It demands the ability to manage tension, be constructively critical of yourself and others, and to sacrifice personal gain for the collective good. The difficulty escalates dramatically in large, complex, or highly integrated systems. A new or improved process's success then relies on a high level of leadership competence from everyone involved in its development and implementation.
I recall trying to change the academic progression process for my department. We were drowning in administrative work managing the transition between semesters, particularly for students who failed or dropped a course. The existing policy, based on course completion and semester grades, was flawed: data showed some students with good GPAs were ineligible to continue, while others with poor GPAs were eligible. This didn’t align with our goal of student success. We successfully overhauled the process and policies to align with our student success goals, cut administrative burden, and bring clarity to students. We saw great progress in retention. This success was contained because our team had strong relationships, a clear understanding of the old process's flaws, and unified goals. Crucially, the people accountable for the goals were the same people accountable for the process change—and the change was contained within a single department.
When this success was scaled across the institution, the implementation faltered. It was now tackling a vastly more complex system, demanding buy-in and agreement from far more decision-makers. It required other leaders to invest significant time and energy to make it work in their areas. For some, the change made little difference to their personal progress. For others, it was a low priority. And for many, their teams simply lacked the leadership muscle to execute it. The leadership lesson here is that when an organization fixates on process improvement as the path to progress, it demands that leaders be highly collaborative, capable of deep systems understanding, creative, adaptive, and willing to sacrifice their own needs for others' success.
Layer 3 - Cooperation
When leaders share success stories, they typically highlight a specific outcome, investment, or process improvement. These stories are vital for recognition and awareness. However, this approach misses a crucial ingredient of progress, limiting the range of leadership behaviours that are rewarded within the organization. While organizational leaders must spend energy on resources and processes, they often overlook a factor that, in my view, can improve organizational progress more than resources and processes combined: the ability to cooperate and coordinate. This layer is often missed, ignored, or deemed simply too difficult to tackle—yet it holds the key to exponential progress.
Managers who cultivate cooperation and coordination within and across organizational boundaries generate far higher levels of impact and progress. These leaders focus their skills in the transition and connection spaces of the organization. They demonstrate high levels of care and compassion, are masterful communicators and relationship builders, and are frequently willing to sacrifice their personal progress for the collective good.
One accomplishment stands out in my career as the ultimate example of cooperation. Just before the pandemic, my team secured funding for a workforce development project in our region, requiring five institutions to collaborate to address labour shortages in the health sector. We knew achieving the targets—jobs, industry partnerships, curriculum, and training—within the timeline would be difficult. Two weeks after starting, the first COVID lockdown was upon us. The project had hard resource-allocation targets, and operational systems had to be created and integrated across five distinct institutional processes. Each partner had individual targets and unique needs, all of which had to fit the collective vision.
The leadership philosophy I established had to drive behaviours across all operational teams. The approach was simple: cooperation and coordination. We started by hiring project leads who could deliver results and who possessed a cooperative mindset. We then had to transmit these values to project teams at the other institutions (over whom we had no direct authority) and to our own internal departments with different reporting structures. Thanks to a small core of strong leaders skilled at fostering cooperative environments, we dramatically exceeded expectations. These leaders led with patience, honesty, integrity, and compassion. When problems arose, they viewed solutions through multiple perspectives, always prioritizing collective success, how we did the work, and the health of our relationships. They were even able to gently shift team members who excelled only at resource allocation or process approaches into doing things differently.
Progress felt slow at first; results always seemed just out of reach for everyone. But the relentless focus on cooperation, coordination, and collaboration allowed the five institutions to remain individually focused yet collectively responsible. For instance, one institution developed a training program and made it instantly available to a partner. This was not just sharing curriculum; it was often co-creating a new delivery method for the partner with no tangible gain for the primary institution. They demonstrated a repeated willingness to freely give their knowledge, experience, time, and commitment to help a partner, with no expectation of reciprocity or gain. While it wasn't perfect—resource allocation and process changes still occasionally dominated—the spirit of cooperation permeated the project.
In the end, progress was certainly measurable: all outcomes were significantly exceeded, and process improvements were made. But the real progress was that the majority of people on that project witnessed and experienced the profound benefits of cooperation and coordination. These benefits have likely created a long-term positive impact on those individuals and their subsequent work. I know they have fundamentally changed how I work and lead.
Progress lies at the heart of every organization. How we achieve that progress, however, is not given the same weight. A narrow, short-term focus on resources, investment, and process improvement can yield results, but that progress is fundamentally limited because the corresponding leadership skills required are limited. Our organizations must broaden their definition of progress and place a greater emphasis on cooperation, collaboration, and coordination. These behaviours demand that leaders expand the depth and breadth of their skills. Not only will this lead to highly positive gains in organizational progress, but, more importantly, it will make work more meaningful and people happier—a critical need in today’s workplaces.
