The biggest problem leaders face today is one they’ll never see.
That’s because work has shifted from tangible, observable activities—Production lines! Print campaigns!—to intangible, distributed ones.
That means even high-performing teams can look idle from the outside, while dysfunctional teams appear active and engaged.
And it’s never been harder to tell which is which for three reasons:
- Work isn’t linear. It requires coordinated judgment, iteration, and synthesis across multiple teams.
- Tools are fragmented. A team’s workflow may span Slack, Notion, Jira, Figma, Zoom, email, etc.—with no single source of truth or narrative thread.
- Everything’s digital. In the absence of physical artifacts or shared physical spaces, it’s no longer obvious who’s doing what, how well, or why delays emerge.
In an attempt to regain control, leaders have attempted to use old models to make work visible: forcing everyone back to the office, surveillance tools, Elon’s “5 things you did this week.”
Not only are these approaches outdated, at their worst, they drive employees to find hacks and workarounds. Instead, leaders must build a new approach: one grounded in clarity of intent, with rituals that surface real work, and tool ecosystems that support transparency, rather than undermine it.
Easy, right?
To better understand what your teams are really doing on a day-to-day basis, here’s what we’ve seen actually work.
The Better Way to Make Work Visible
- Ask for demos, not presentations. Don’t ask teams to report on status, give them an opportunity to show their status through demos and walk-throughs. Ask them to share the story behind the work (and the why) and what tradeoffs they’re using to make decisions.
- Draw your processes. Ask teams to draw out how they’ll approach their work–including key milestones, collaboration moments, and critical decision-making points. Bring teams together to share their individual drawings, and discuss how they intersect and where they can be improved.
- Dedicate spaces to work-in-progress. If you’re physically together, literally select a room to pin weekly updates of work. If you’re hybrid or remote, designate a single space (like a Miro board or a Slack channel) to ask teams to share their drafts in the open.
Set Rules for Tools
- Designate canonical tools per type of work. Designate one place for decisions, one for documentation, one for tasks. Choose tools based on whether they will be used, and avoid picking a tool solely because of the price tag (because people will go around it and splinter work).
- Assign tool stewards and protect their resources. As with any set of tools, they need to be maintained and put away to maintain clarity and hygiene. If no one is assigned to do this, it will be forgotten.
Show Up Differently as a Leader
- Focus on outcomes. Translate your strategy into clear outcomes to chase (like increased demand or decreased wait times) instead of tracking outputs that require “performing” work.
- Listen as much as you talk. Attend key project standups, retros, or even design critiques with curiosity and empathy to better understand how, and why, work is done.
- Bring teams together. Hold “blocker office hours” where teams can surface cross-team misalignments or stuck work.
